


How Many of Them Can We Make Die

by Untherius



Series: High Warlady of Yuma [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Emberverse - S. M. Stirling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 03:49:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Untherius/pseuds/Untherius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the sun sets, Yuma launches its pre-emptive counterstrike against the invading army assaulting its shores.<br/>Their strategy calls for coordinated dirigible fire-bombing and covert, black-ops ninja strikes.<br/>The enemy, still stinging from their losses, break upon the Yuma wall and then it's game-on for Buffy and her people!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Dead of the Night

Stronghold of Yuma  
September 4, CY 20, 2018 AD

Captain George Stephenson, night-ops dirigible pilot for the Southwestern Confederation Army, pedaled like mad aboard his SR-42 Blackfish stealth dirigible. In truth, the Blackfish was nothing of the sort, just that General Harris had a penchant for giving his creations bizarre-sounding names.

Together with his co-pilot, First Lieutenant Pedro Sanchez, the two of them pedaled against a shaft, which was connected to a gear box, which drove another shaft, which turned a pair of belts, which each drove a three-bladed propeller—salvaged from small pre-Change aircraft—mounted on either side of the rear of the gondola.

Considerable research and development had gone into getting the rattles and squeaks out of the propulsion system to make it quiet. The very first dirigible had literally shaken itself apart and the General had had to track down and employ a few people who'd been CNC machinists before the Change. Every moving part, both those specifically designed to move, as well as those that moved by default, were kept well-lubricated both to reduce noise and the chance of sparks, the latter of which were particularly dangerous given the extreme flammability of the hydrogen filling the internal bladders above their heads.

Stephenson turned the rudder incrementally and watched as the long nose of the craft's attenuated, tapered envelope swung eastward toward his pre-determined flight path ten miles from the river, following an SR-55 Orca medium stealth dirigible and an SR-71 Humpback heavy stealth bomber, both well ahead of him and visible as small round dots hovering above the sand and rock. He glanced westward to see two other Blackfish and another Orca heading into the setting sun on their way to engage the smaller force headed for El Centro. He checked to make sure the two Blackfish flanking him were still in formation, then let the propellers wind down a little before shifting the gearbox lever to engage Full Impulse.

“Full Impulse,” another one of General Harris' wacky ideas, was really just a fancy way of saying, “high gear.” It had little to do with actual airspeed--which was directly influenced by wind-speed and direction, as well as the payload being carried—and everything to do with the gearing combination driving the propellers.

All seven of the craft currently in the air were close to capacity. In addition to the heavy black fabric covering the envelope, each carried a six-member black-ops ninja team, their equipment, and the maximum complement of armament. Consequently, their altitude was barely over one hundred feet and they'd required assistance from ground crews just to clear the Yuma wall.

The craft lurched as the drive belts engaged the turbofan—removed from a small jet engine--at the rear of the gondola and it surged forward as it accelerated. They were unlikely to reach anywhere close to the full eighty-mile-per-hour top speed until after they'd delivered their payload. The fan would be disengaged shortly before offloading the ninjas and not re-engaged until the return trip, for it made far too much noise.

Stephenson's mission was fairly straightforward. First, he was to deposit the ninja team at the edge of an arroyo three miles inland from Golfo de Santa Clara, a small fishing village near the mouth of the Colorado River. Their job was to conduct repeated strike-and-fade raids against the enemy for the duration of their ninety-mile approach to Yuma.

After offloading the ninjas, he was to proceed to the coast and drop incendiary devices—small pottery jars filled with what everyone called poor-man's napalm—on pre-determined target types. His assigned targets were, in order or priority, still-loaded landing craft, unloaded landing craft, and siege engines.

All personnel involved in the air strikes were also to gather intelligence on the enemy. The objective of the operation was simple: continually harass the enemy from the air and return with information on anything not visible from Yuma or Confederation ground forces for the duration of the conflict. The High Warlady intended to rain down destruction upon them—her words—twenty-four-seven.

*****

Stephenson flexed his knees against the pressure of the gondola deck as the entire ship shot upward with the sudden release of weight. Six ninja Slayers and their equipment—full leather armor, desert camo for day-light raids, spare blades, blow-guns with scores of darts tipped with a mixture of venoms harvested from rattlesnakes and bark scorpions, scores of shuriken, hundreds of the large arrows flung by their four-hundred-pound bows, dozens of small incendiary devices, as well as several days' food and water—weighed over half a ton. Their first strikes were to coincide with the diversions created by the first dirigible attacks.

Now cruising at two hundred feet—still within arrow range—Stephenson cranked the propellers to one-quarter impulse and guided his craft toward the coast, pitching it slightly upward to gain a little more altitude. It was nearly pitch-black, the waxing moon barely a sliver above the eastern hills, and none of the other stealth dirigibles were visible. There was little chance of a mid-air collision, as they were all spaced out at least a mile apart along the vast swath of the enemy's unbelievably broad landing site. He and every other night-ops airman had drilled blindfolded to simulate working in total darkness, even before field training under new-moon conditions. That night's job would be exactly like that.

He grinned to himself as the enemy campfires drew closer. Like most military men who'd spent untold hours training, he was eager to kick some actual ass. He knew the risks, although it helped that their source was all-but-invisible in the darkness that glided by below.

A blaze of light closer to the river-mouth caught his attention and he grinned some more. One of the other airships had drawn first blood! More fires erupted up and down the shore as his fellows-in-arms began delivering their payloads. It was his turn. They stopped pedaling as he got up and took his place at the bow of the gondola, letting momentum carry them forward. He pulled on the special pre-Change Nomex fireproof gloves and picked up the first gallon-sized jar of napalm. Sanchez came up behind him, opened a small canister holding a fully-enclosed tallow candle and used a pair of forceps to hold the kerosene-soaked fiber wick into the flame. When it had caught fire, Stephenson turned, selected his target—of which there were frighteningly many—and dropped.

He smiled as fire blossomed from the deck of a ship. He only had a moment to admire his handiwork before reaching for another jar. He and his teammate repeated the procedure over and over, leaving a trail of flaming ships in their wake. With each bomb dropped, the airship rose incrementally higher.

When their complement of gallon jars had been depleted, they turned back toward shore in search of siege weapons that would be the targets of quart-sized jars. They would be difficult to spot in the dark. Fortunately, the daylight strikes would have little trouble with visibility and targets of opportunity were always well within their purview.

They dropped jar after flaming jar, each erupting into fiery death below. It was unclear if the enemy was trying to shoot them down and whether he would know it if they were.

When their payload had been fully deployed, Stephenson gazed westward and watched more fires blaze into existence, each appearing tiny in the distance. He exchanged a high-five with his co-pilot, turned north and brought the ship up to Full Impulse, quickly leaving the enemy behind still suffering under the barrage from the Orca and the Humpback, both of which carried far more ammunition than did a Blackfish.

The two of them broke into an impromptu chorus of “The March of Cambreath,” which had become the Confederation's unofficial national anthem. Making unnecessary noise was technically a breach of black-ops protocol, but their mission was accomplished, they were well out of bow-shot--and probably ear-shot, too—and there was little doubt in the enemy's mind who'd been dropping fiery death upon them from out of the black of the night. He wished he could say they were leaving flaming ruins in their wake, but he knew they'd barely put a dent into the enemy. It was just the beginning.

He'd be doing it again the next night, the night after...hells, every night for the duration of the conflict. The daylight operation would commence at dawn and they'd be more effective. The enemy now knew about the Confederation air force, so they'd expended that aspect of the element of surprise. Hopefully they'd come to dread what would be nightly attacks. It was widely whispered and hoped that the enemy might just drop dead from sheer sleep deprivation, although that was probably wishful thinking. Even the High Warlady insisted that any foe that had gone through that much effort to mount an offense was not going to just turn around and give up without having been well and truly beaten.

He turned his thoughts to the next couple of hours. He could see the entire area in his mind's eye: far to the northwest, the ruins of Mexicali and Calexico, most of which had burned in the Change; to the south of Yuma, the meager traces of San Luis Rio Colorado, slowly being swallowed by the desert. That city had also burned in the Change and then most of its remains had been wiped off the desert floor by the Colorado River when Hoover Dam collapsed in the third Change Year, also obliterating the northwestern half of Yuma itself and carving an entirely new course.

They'd approach Yuma from the northeast before bringing the ship into a shallow dive—a steep one was ill-advised with an envelope as long as those designed for night-ops airships. Once the ship had been properly grounded, they'd file their reports, then debrief with General Harris at dawn, who would in turn brief the commanders of the daylight strike crews. Then he'd get some shut-eye before doing it all over again.


	2. Death From the Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slayer-led ninja teams whittle away at the enemy from the ground.

Golfo de Santa Clara, Colorado River delta, northern end of Gulf of California  
September 4, CY 20, 2018 AD

Slayer Violet Jones crouched in the darkness, looking across the road that led to the small fishing town of Golfo de Santa Clara. The enemy encampment, or part of it, lay on the other side. As early as the next morning, that enemy would begin moving horses, catapults and other implements of death and destruction toward her home. One advantage to working in the dark was that not only could one move largely unseen, the bulk of the opposition was also swallowed up by the night. It was much easier to focus on the twenty or so closest targets when the other twenty thousand were unseen.

She was in charge of one of eight Slayer-led black-ops ninja teams assigned to conduct repeated stealth raids as part of a continual harassment campaign against the enemy. Her team was unique in that it was composed entirely of Slayers and as such, they had the potential to do far more damage than the others.

Violet had no problem with that. Slayer or not, assassin or not, she'd be damned if she'd let those bastards anywhere near her children!

The fire-bombing by the night-ops dirigible fleet had begun long before her team had reached the road. The camp was already in total chaos. That was part of the plan. With the enemy's attention directed skyward, it would be much easier for the ninja teams to approach, strike, and disappear back into the night before anyone knew they were there. That would not be the case during the day...but that would come later and she returned her attention to the present.

She looked up, trying to determine the location of the nearest dirigible. That was difficult. Each vessel was completely black, from the outer envelope to the matte paint and blacking covering the gondola and propulsion systems to the clothing of the crew. Only the intermittently-visible small flame high above and the dirigible-shaped void against an otherwise starry sky showed each craft's location. The dirigible crews wouldn't be able to differentiate between friend and foe from several hundred feet up in the dark, so it was her responsibility to stay out of the way.

She could hear the faint twang and hiss of arrows being shot upward, barely audible through the general pandemonium. Some of the arrows falling back to Earth would surely hit their own archers, but the screams from any of those incidents merged with those from the fires. Without a clear view of their targets—which were, unbeknownst to them, drifting higher and higher from the progressive lightening of their loads—the chance of bringing one of them down was extremely low.

A sentry walked by on the dirt road-bed, back-lit by the fires. She pulled a shuriken from her belt and flipped it. The wet crunch of steel through tissue and bone and a subsequent weak gurgling sound told her she'd hit the mark. While ninja training required extreme precision with all thrown weapons, anything hurled by a Slayer at close range and hitting the neck would result in near-instant death. Her target fell heavily to the ground and she waited to see if anyone noticed.

Satisfied, she scurried over to where the man lay, his blood leaking out onto the ground. She pulled a rolled-up piece of paper from an interior pocket of her tunic and stuffed it into his mouth, just in case she didn't have an opportunity to do so later. It had a message written on it in Spanish to the effect that they'd just had their asses handed to them by a bunch of girls. She remained crouched and motionless for a few more moments, musing briefly on the fragility of male ego, then made a series of slight hissing sounds, signaling her team to move across the road.

The other Slayers were barely visible as black-against-black as they moved through the night and Viola could only see them because she was looking for them and knew how to spot dark things in the dark. It was an integral part of ninja training. Looking back toward the enemy camp, now just yards away, she made a point of not gazing directly at the fires that were sprouting up like weeds. Nothing killed one's night-vision like the brightness of a flame, especially when there was that much of it.

They didn't have much time. The success of their operation depended upon their not being seen, which was becoming less likely as the fires increased. They had to get in, kill as many combatants as possible, and then fade back into the night like ghosts of death, all within the space of fifteen or twenty minutes.

Unlike their comrades-in-arms back in Yuma, who would have to defend against the main assault in a few days, her job consisted of long periods of boredom interspersed with short periods of terror. In fact, most of a ninja's mission consisted of getting into position. Now that they were, it was time to strike.

She pulled another shuriken from her belt and hurled it at the nearest soldier. She was already holding the next when the first struck its target. She threw that one at a man who'd whirled around in response to the first man's yelps of pain. It buried itself in his neck, the arterial spray ink-like in the dark.

Similar sounds around her told her that her teammates were in action. She continued the assault. Flip-flip-flip and three more men went down. She turned with a slight, economical motion, never leaving her crouched position, to sink another into another man's skull. As a Slayer, she could throw _hard_ and every one of her teammates could cleave a vulture in twain with a plastic dinner plate at twenty paces.

Moving further into the camp, she pulled her dart gun from its pouch. The rattlesnake and bark scorpion venoms tipping the darts would not be immediately fatal to most. Victims would either die in a day or two, or wish they had, depending on individual physiology and whether or not the dart hit close enough to an artery large enough to put enough poison into the major organs or near enough to the spinal cord. As the primary target area for a dart was the neck, death was highly likely. In any event, they would render the target completely unable to fight for at least a week, probably longer.

She inserted a dart into her blow-gun, aimed, and blew...direct hit. She re-loaded while the man's screams—snake and scorpion venom hurt like hell—drew attention. She blew another at a man who'd arrived to help the first one, and then a third at another...all direct hits. Under the distraction of three screaming, dying men, she moved again, lest her position be determined, and readied another dart.

She spotted a man creeping out into the dark, evidently looking for her. She darted him, which attracted four more men, whom she also darted. She had six darts left. A flame erupted just yards from her position and men came running.

She was sure she'd been seen in the fire's glare. She quickly blew three of her remaining darts...one missed...before retreating back toward the road. She heard footsteps behind her and she spun around, drawing her knife—a six-inch Bowie type with a double edge--just in time to see the glint of a blade moving through her peripheral vision. She ducked and rolled, the hiss of steel uncomfortably close, and slashed at an ankle. The unmistakable feel of metal passing through flesh and bone followed by a scream told her that there was now a loose foot waiting to be a trip-hazard.

She came up behind another man and hit him open-palmed in the back of the head. With Slayer strength, that could have been enough to behead him. Instead, she heard the crunch of bone and tendons as his occipital lobe fractured and tissues tore from the upper spinal column. She shoved the newly-dead man against another and used the recoil force to dodge another two-foot blade.

She brought her knife up in a sweeping, back-handed motion, severing the hand the held it. She intercepted another, grabbed that man's arm, and ripped it off, using it to club another in the face. That man distracted by a broken nose, she swept her knife across his throat, barely missing most of the arterial spray. In the same motion, she snatched the sword from the loose arm and planted it into the face of another attacker.

In the meantime, the second man had pushed the corpse off himself and clambered to his feet. Violet rushed him with Slayer speed and crushed his sternum with the heel of her palm, then ripped off his jaw and jammed it into his neck.

She turned to spot the man whose foot she'd severed crawling toward the edge of the road yelling something in Spanish. She took three steps and brought her heel down on the back of his neck. He twitched twice and was still.  
She looked around quickly as she returned to her crouching position. Most new potential targets were pre-occupied trying to extinguish the nearest fire, which was consuming a catapult, or at least rendering it un-usable. She heard more noise to her right and turned to see four more men rushing at her.

She quickly checked her six, then backed up toward the bodies she'd just slain. She planted a foot on one, ripped off its head and hurled it toward her newest attackers like a shot-put...direct hit. While that man reeled from a mild concussion, she chose her next target and flung the arm she'd removed earlier. That missed, but it was enough to catch him off-balance and she met him with an enemy blade. As it sliced through his torso, she was already leaning into the next attack.

She swept that blade upward and with the sudden release from the hinging body it had just cloven, she transferred that force into a sweeping motion that cut the next man in half. That motion ended halfway through the third man's skull.

She spun around just in time to slam her knife into the neck of another and he dropped like a sack of potatoes. The man whom she'd hit with the flying head began to retreat. She rushed him and snapped his neck one-handed.  
Violet was quickly running out of time and opportunity. Wiping off her knife, she re-sheathed it before picking up an enemy blade. It was a two-foot sword patterned on a machete, a weapon intended more for application of brute force than finesse. She hefted it and could immediately feel that it was not balanced for throwing. When one had Slayer strength, that didn't matter so much and anything she threw would leave a serious bruise, if not blunt-force trauma. She turned and hurled it toward one of the men fighting the flames. That man toppled, screaming, into the fire.

She picked up another blade and hurled that. It embedded itself into another man's back. The remaining six broke off to rush at her, swords drawn. They were quickly joined by four others bearing spears. She would have to be careful--the word-fame of Mezoamerican spear-throwers was legendary—and engaging multiple opponents was always something of a dance.

She hurled three enemy blades, bringing down two of her attackers. She met the remaining four with one of their own blades in each hand. She kicked the closest one in the groin and he dropped to the ground. With Slayer strength behind that kick, he wasn't going to be doing anything any time soon. A pair of thrusts caught two more in the chest. She pitched backward as the tip of two feet of sharpened steel passed uncomfortably close to her face.

She regained her balance first, ducking beneath a follow-up slash, and swept his legs. The man came down on his back, but retained his grip on his sword. Rolling over, he slashed at Violet's legs. She deftly leapt over his strike as it passed through where her tibias had been moments before. He came in for an over-arm cut. She stepped quickly inside it and crushed his trachea before grabbing his blade from his hand and severing his head. She turned her follow-through into a ducking spin that deflected a spear.

She pitched backward again as another spear passed through the space her body had occupied moments before. She threw the sword in her left hand at the nearest attacker, snatching a third spear out of mid-air with the same motion, translating its momentum into a full spin, and hurled it back to its owner, delivering it into his chest. Her release flowed into the deflection of a fourth spear.

She returned to a crouch, dodging two swords, using muscle elasticity to spring into the air. A double kick snapped a pair of necks. Hanging in mid-air for a moment, she flipped a shuriken into another man's face, and came down behind another, driving her knife into the base of his neck. She allowed his collapse to free her knife before again returning to a crouched position.

Another knot of men rushed at her. She pushed the tip of her knife into the body beside her, then pulled out a small butane lighter and a pint-sized container of bisqued ceramic filled with napalm. She lit a small piece of oil-soaked cloth, then hurled it at her opponents. It shattered, splashing burning liquid over them, stopping them in their tracks as they tried in vain to put themselves out.

More motion to her left caught her attention. At least a dozen more men were running toward her along the road. She reclaimed her knife and took a quick inventory of weapons at her disposal and their locations. Shifting her position slightly, she tightened her grip on her knife, took a fallen spear in her other hand, and waited.

When her attackers had closed to a dozen yards, she again exploded into action. She hurled the spear she held with frightening speed. She heard, rather than saw, the crunch of bone and tissue when it hit home, for she was already pivoting around another body, reaching for its sword. She snatched it up and hurled it in the same motion. She repeated this over and over, turning objects on the ground—blades, spears, rocks, the foot she'd severed minutes ago--into a cloud of projectiles into which ran the foe.

Screams ran together. The icy sting of steel on her earlobe and the _whoosh_ as the shaft holding it rushed past her head filled her with a fresh surge of adrenaline. She ended the man who'd thrown it. The iron tang of spilled blood filled her nostrils as she looked around her. Satisfied, she wiped her knife, re-sheathed it, and faded into the night.

She rendezvoused with her teammates before retreating back up the arroyo to where they'd stashed the rest of their gear near their drop-point. Between the six of them, they'd killed close to a hundred and thirty enemy combatants and wounded dozens more. If the other teams did even half that well, they were looking at upwards of five, possibly six, hundred casualties—still a drop in the bucket, but not bad for basically twenty minutes' work. Four more nights of that and they could be looking at as many as another three thousand in addition to however many they'd manage to pick off during the day.

It was just past midnight and they wanted to get a little sleep before attacking again with the rising sun in the enemy's eyes.

*****

Golfo de Santa Clara  
September 5, CY 20, 2018 AD

Violet Jones crouched behind a rock in the pre-dawn light. Behind another rock some dozen meters away crouched Yumiko Toranaga. The team would be working in tandem for the daylight portions of the operation. The one would cover the other during their anticipated retreat from the combat zone. She and her team were spread out above the road just outside town, a full two hundred yards from it, a quarter mile or so apart, and looking south-westward.

The sun would soon rise above the arroyos behind them and to their left. They'd all changed from their black clothing into desert camo, which Violet said made them look like Tusken Raiders—a reference she'd noticed fewer and fewer people seemed to understand with each passing year.

She held her bow in one hand, an arrow already on the string. The five-foot-long, four-hundred-pound stave, lighter than the seven-hundred-pound draw of her usual war bow, was loosely wrapped in very lightly-stained muslin. It was capable of throwing an arrow upwards of three hundred yards, further if the wind was right.

Her quiver held thirty of the yard-long, half-inch-thick arrows used by most Slayer archers. She and each of her team would loose twenty of them before moving from their positions. The other ten would be kept in reserve to be used against the inevitable pursuers. Two dozen more waited for her at intervals along her chosen retreat path, points stuck in the dirt to ease retrieval. They also each carried a dozen shuriken and a pair of twelve-inch blades to be used in the event of close combat.

She scanned the encampment as she waited for the Earth to turn. The fires from the attacks of the night before had long since died, leaving charred, smoking remains of things best left unidentified. Ships continued to unload, soldiers were already up and about, and it very much looked like the enemy would begin to move north within the hour. There were already tens of thousands of the enemy strung out for many miles along the shore. She and her team could be easily overwhelmed, that realization threatening her nerve. They could all effortlessly outrun anyone on foot, but arrows and horses would be another matter entirely.

She re-focused, reminding herself that while it would suck to have an arrow suddenly sprout from your chest and squirt blood all over your huevos rancheros, there were mothers back home who would soon be under attack while nursing their own babies. She chose her targets, slowly moved a half-dozen arrows from her quiver to a place near her right knee, and waited.

When she felt the warmth of the sun on the back of her head and saw its light on the rock in front of her, she attacked. She rose and drew in one smooth motion. Aided by Slayer speed and the distance to her targets, five more arrows were in the air by the time the first struck. Her peripheral vision caught the motion made by Yumiko as she, too, loosed arrows.

She ducked back behind her rock and listened for their results while she readied more arrows. One...two...three...eleven screams out of a possible twelve. She looked toward Yumiko and gave her a thumbs-up. She waited a few minutes while her heart rate slowed and then carefully peeked over the rock. Good...the enemy apparently hadn't determined their position. She selected new targets and they repeated the procedure...ten screams this time.

She waited again, hearing the faint screams from other men being impaled by her sisteren. She peeked again. Several men, a few holding spears or bows with arrows-on-strings, had crossed the road and were walking in her general direction. They still hadn't quite made their position, although they clearly knew there was someone out there. She had eight arrows left before it would be time to begin her retreat. She readied four of them.  
Their targets were now on the move and they would have to choose them one at a time. They were slightly closer and would be easier to hit. She focused, drew, rose slowly from her position, loosed and ducked back again. Another scream accompanied a reach for the next arrow.

Draw-rise-locate-loose-sink...scream. Lather...rinse...repeat. Those eight arrows depleted...and seven enemy dead or wounded by her hand and five by Yumiko's...she began her slow retreat. Leaving their position unseen would be tricky. There was better than a mile of more-or-less open ground between them and the mouth of the nearest arroyo and they would not have time to wait for the coming air support. The sun was still over their shoulders and in the enemy's eyes and they would use that to their advantage.

She put another arrow to the string, checked her six, nodded to Yumiko, and backed up in slow, fluid motions, from rock to shrub to rock, for fifty yards while Yumiko covered her. She could hear the occasional scream, both near and far, as her sisteren worked at their jobs. She sank into a crouch behind another rock, behind which she'd deposited six arrows, and prepared to cover her teammate.

Yumiko was already on the move. They were both well out of counterstrike range, unless the enemy had anyone who could draw at least a three-hundred-pound stave, which was unlikely. She watched her team-mate move with the same fluid motions all ninja trained to make. Violet only had to fire once...a miss.

They hunkered down and waited, bows at the ready. Violet peeked around the left side of her rock. At least a dozen of the enemy now ran in their direction and had probably seen their move. No matter...until she started seeing equestrian pursuit, she wasn't too concerned. She watched them approach...two hundred yards...she gave Yumiko the _hold_ signal...one fifty...one hundred...fifty yards...then, _loose_! They both popped up and let fly...twung...twung...twung.... They were close enough to see the blood spray as their arrows punched through their targets from the front, rather than on the more generally downward angle they had at range. One of Violet's arrows passed through one man before hitting another.

Yumiko gave Violet the _ove_ signal and she retreated to the next rock two hundred yards back. She grabbed another arrow from the bundle there, drew, aimed and loosed as Yumiko moved. Once behind her own cover, they loosed arrows in rapid fire before moving together to the next rock...and the next...and the next...leaving a trail of enemy bodies behind them, some lifeless, others writhing in agony, their blood spilling out to feed the desert wildlife.

The pair had covered the mile to the mouth of the nearest arroyo where the rock rose gradually out of the dirt and sand without much further incident. They crouched down in the shallow gully that drained the interior and peeked out over its rim.

“Crap,” Violet muttered, “horses.”

“Took 'em long enough,” replied Yumiko. She looked herself, then made a snort of derision. “They didn't even bother to put on armor...not that it would have made much difference.” Their bows were heavy enough to drive an arrow through almost anything, especially at under fifty yards. She put another arrow to the string. “Let's see how many of _them_ we can make die, shall we?”

Violet grinned unseen behind the tawny mesh covering her mouth. “Yes,” she said, “let's.”

She put an arrow to her own string and the two of them waited. She could feel the steadily-growing pounding of hooves...not many, but enough to be troublesome. They had twenty-four arrows between them, including those in their quivers. They would have to time this well. They would have to shoot at...Violet checked over the rim...twenty moving targets and still retreat far enough up the arroyo to reach the steeper, rockier ground where they would have more cover and more arrows.

She took a deep breath, nodded to Yumiko and the two of them stood up and loosed. Nock-draw-loose...nock-draw-loose...nock-draw-loose...a dozen arrows each. The screams of man and beast floated through the air. It was a good thing the two of them hadn't been deemed the threat they really were...otherwise, they could easily be facing twice as many pursuers.

Together, they ran another two hundred yards--which for a non-Slayer would be bicycle-speed—up the channel to their next arrow drop, bounding over rocks, nearly a dozen horsemen closing on them. They turned twice en-route to loose an arrow each.

They skidded to a stop as they reached rockier ground, their pursuers still a hundred yards behind. They each spun, knelt down to grab arrows and rapidly knocked, drew and loosed, holding their bows horizontally, never rising from the knee. The lead horse fell, rolling over its rider and tripping the one behind it. Nock-draw-loose...nock-draw-loose...nock-draw-loose.... Slayer speed turned two dozen arrows into a wall of death. One by one, horse and rider fell in rapid succession, the screams of man and beast blending together.

Violet and Yumiko didn't wait to see if anyone was getting up. They rose, spinning on the balls of their feet, and charged up the increasingly-rocky ground. They bounded from rock to rock, their speed slowing with the uneven terrain and the exertion of their ascent.

A single arrow ricocheted off a rock behind Violet. In a single motion, she turned, pulled an arrow from her quiver, nocked and drew. “Keep going!” she said to Yumiko. Violet aimed and released, her arrow impaling their assailant through the chest, the double-splash of blood wetting the ground. Violet turned again and followed her teammate.

They reached their next arrow stash and flattened themselves to the ground, waiting and watching. Time seemed to stop as they scanned the land. They held for a full five minutes, which felt like an eternity.

“I think we're clear,” said Violet quietly. “But stay alert,” she added, “and stay quiet.”

They continued their climb up the arroyo, still in the shadow cast by the morning sun, their soft antelope-skin shoes clinging to the bare rock that took their every step, until at last they reached their team equipment stash deep in a cleft near the crest of the flats above. Two others had beaten them there.

Violet loosened her mouth mesh, letting it hang freely. “Whoo! That was tense!”

One of the other Slayers, Crystal McAdams, handed her some water. She took a drink, then handed it to Yumiko, who also drank. They sat down to rest.

Ten minutes later, the last two arrived from over the crest and after they'd hydrated and rested, the debriefing began. Between them, they'd eliminated another one hundred seventeen of the enemy, which translated to somewhere in the range of four hundred fifty combined for the morning's strike. Added to last night's results brought them to close to a thousand and still no losses for Team Violet.

Strictly-speaking, keeping score was somewhat of a moot point. “As many as possible” meant exactly that. Still, it helped group morale to have some quantifiable idea of what impact they were having on the force their friends and family would face within the week.

“We shouldn't expect things to go like this again,” said Violet. “The enemy will be expecting a repeat of both last night and this morning. We'll have to alter our strategy for the next set of strikes.”

“Keep 'em guessing, si?” said Crystal.

“Exactly!”

They all chuckled and they dug into their supplies for second-breakfast. Afterward, Violet began to unfold the light semi-mesh cotton tarp. It was taupe on one side and black on the other. “You should all take a nap,” she said. 

“I'll take first watch.”

They all agreed. Crystal helped spread out the tarp before crawling under it herself. Violet sat down, put an arrow to the string and began to actively scan her surroundings, always listening.

After a long while, she could make out the faint whirring made by the drives of approaching dirigibles. She carefully crept up to the rim of the arroyo. There were sure to be searching parties and one never knew who might be wandering around out there looking for them. A careful, three-sixty scan of the horizon told her she was alone...for now.

A small dirigible, a C-23 Remora support craft, floated over the edge of the rim while two slightly smaller F-4 Kestrels—General Harris really did have quite the flair for the dramatic—rained fire and arrows down on the enemy. Two miles to the north, the Remora abruptly changed course and made a steep descent. That did not bode well. Each team carried a signal mirror and the airship's maneuvering meant someone had been injured and was preparing for extraction. While the line-of-sight with the enemy was questionable, the team in question would move per protocol.

Each group was permitted to operate down to fifty percent, after which point the remaining members would join another team for the duration of the operation. When the enemy was within two days of Yuma, the ninja teams would all be extracted for lack of cover and would then either join teams on the western side, where there was more cover, or assist in defense of the city.

*****

El Faro ruins  
September 6, CY 20, 2018 AD

Slayer Rona Lincoln crouched on a rooftop. She could hear the enemy marching along the road below her. She was keenly aware of the mild pain and not-so-mild itch of her left breast and she had to make an effort to ignore it.  
Her team and the other on the west side of the Colorado River had started their assault a full twenty-four hours behind the others, owing to the general lack of anything resembling cover between the enemy landing site and the southern edge of cultivated land. They'd used the time to re-acquaint themselves with the general lay of the land along the road leading toward El Centro, draw up battle plans, set up supply and ammunitions dumps, and get into position.

Night operations gave dark-skinned people such as herself a distinct advantage over the fair-skinned. Her teammates had cajoled her into going into battle buck-naked and after several rounds of insistence and refusal—partly on the grounds that she didn't perceive herself as being _that_ black--she'd finally agreed.

It had been surprisingly effective. While her own team knew not to stare, which was made easy by virtue of them being spread out along the road, she'd found the enemy to be extremely distracted. They had apparently not expected to be attacked by a nude, African Valkyrie. Many of them had just stood there, as though frozen in place, and practically let her waltz up and butcher them.

That was until a blade sliced her left nipple open. It had hurt like a son-of-a-motherless-goat, but rather than making her an easy target, it had just made her mad. She knew anger to be a weapon only to one's opponent, but it had been the best way to channel the pain. Instead of her wound driving her back into the night, she'd lain into the enemy with renewed, fury-driven aggression. They'd fallen by the dozen, caught between the hammer of her blows and the anvil of the road.

Any healing wound itched. The worse the wound and faster the healing, the worse the itch. It was fairly bad for a non-life-threatening wound and with the speed of Slayer healing, it itched like crazy! The sting from the salt in her sweat wasn't helping either.

She re-focused on her target. In a small tree across the road hung a large hornet nest. The insects had appeared a couple of years prior to the Change. Their populations had risen dramatically during the first year along with their available food, in the form of human corpses. Before the Change, nests like that were usually exterminated. Now they were mostly left alone, partly because people generally had better things to do and partly because wasps preyed on more serious agricultural pests, securing themselves as one of the only effective post-Change pesticides.

Rona was about to turn them into a biological weapon. She held a broad-point arrow to the string of her bow and waited. The enemy column was an advance unit of around five thousand, probably intended to sweep the area and secure the vicinity of El Centro in anticipation of the main siege. It was composed of about two-thirds cavalry, the remaining third split roughly in half between pikemen and bolo-throwers.

The combat units were spread out in response to the fire-bombing. Casualties were lower when fewer men were splashed by napalm and that was only possible with men spread out. It was also how bolo-throwers had enough room to swing their weapons. That was all well and good, for angry wasps wouldn't care.

Rona, now clad in mottled sage-green, rose up, still out of the enemy's line-of-sight, and drew, holding her bow at an angle she judged would yield the best chance of severing the branch to which the nest was attached. She aimed, held the draw for a moment, and loosed. Shot from her four-hundred-pound bow, the arrow traveled so quickly, sound was the best way to judge the results.

She heard the gratifying _crack_ of cloven wood and watched the nest drop out of her sight. She would have liked to observe the results, but it was just too dangerous. It would put her in range of both enemy weapons and the great cloud of angrily-buzzing wasps.

Instead, she backed up to the rear of the building and paused. Few of the enemy would die of anaphylactic shock from allergy or over-envenomation. Most deaths and injuries would probably occur as a result of accidents involving panicking horses. Otherwise, the damage would be mainly psychological. They would still use the resulting distraction to their advantage. All three ninja teams were working together and several members were waiting in cover just at the edge of blow-gun range. They were to attack shortly after the wasps engaged.

The screams of the wasp-stung and darted men were indistinguishable. Rona readied two dozen arrows, then counted down the ninety seconds they'd defined as the duration of the dart attack. The instant time expired, she nocked, drew and loosed in rapid succession, lofting several arrows before changing her trajectory. The enemy's screams continued. She checked below her, then dropped to the ground, snatching her remaining equipment as she rebounded.

She slinked to the corner of the building and looked around it. As anticipated, the enemy were in chaos, although she didn't expect it to last long. A few of her arrows had found new homes in enemy flesh, some fatal, some not.  
She checked her six and noted her teammates, bows-in-hand, retreating toward the scattered buildings some thirty yards behind them. She and the leaders of the other teams were the only Slayers on this side of the river. It was the Slayers' responsibilities to lay down cover fire for the non-Slayers during their retreats.

It was hoped that the enemy wouldn't know where the attack had originated. That confusion would give the ninja teams an escape window. Men would probably be sent in all directions. Sure enough, no sooner had the last ninja reached the first stage of cover, than several men came into view, dashing in their general direction.

Rona waited from the cover of a building, a shuriken at the ready, her bow leaning against the wall. Close-range strikes were usually the most effective in her line of work. Everyone waited until their pursuers were at point-blank range. For Rona, that meant the man who'd just rounded the corner and stood looking her in the eyes. She quickly hit him in the throat, collapsing his windpipe. As she drew her hand back, she grabbed his shirt, pulled him out of sight, and snapped his neck one-handed before lowering him to the ground.

Another man rounded the corner. She thrust her shuriken into his throat, dragged him out of sight, too, snapped his neck and reclaimed her weapon as he fell to the ground. She flattened herself against the wall and watched another man go stiff and fall flat onto his back, the dark metal of a shuriken visibly protruding from his forehead. Another man looked toward his fallen comrade and Rona fatally buried her own shuriken into his occipital lobe.  
She snatched up her bow and prepared to cover her people. She was in full morning sun, but still not in line-of-sight from the road. She watched the blur of dull green as her people moved past some small trees toward the next cluster of buildings at the edge of what once was a sorry excuse for a town, even by pre-Change standards. Four horsemen rode after them and she put an arrow through each rider.

Satisfied, she followed her team. They repeated the procedure over the remaining half-mile at the end of which they hunkered down in an irrigation canal. There was already standing water in it from an early fall rain and many of them submerged themselves in it, breathing through reeds, waiting for the enemy to leave.

After what felt like an hour, but was probably only twenty minutes, Rona, carefully emerged beneath the cover of a willow. She could hear, rather than see, an enemy detachment of what sounded like a couple hundred light horse moving along the road. They were probably heading toward the nearby agricultural settlement.

It wasn't a dignified town per se, and apparently hadn't been even before the Change. A few families, currently evacuated to El Centro, lived there, although most of the buildings had been gutted for materials needed to make farm implements, dirigibles, war engines, and weapons. They had been using an abandoned farm house a couple of hundred yards away as a headquarters. They'd left it after evacuating two wounded team-members the day before. That was just as well, as it wasn't long before she saw smoke rising from that direction and she guessed the enemy had set it on fire.

They'd reached another of those annoying waiting periods. Later in the day, and under cover of the approaching dirigible attack, they'd slink back across the road and head north. Leapfrogging the enemy, they would take up position in a collection of arroyos just to the west of the main road. Their goal was to take position by late afternoon and lob arrows at the passing enemy with the setting sun at their own backs. From there, they would conduct more night raids.

An SR-42 Blackfish would resupply them with ammunition after dark. Until then, there would be a whole lot of boredom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While niether the European hornet, nor the bald-faced hornet, occur in the Colorado River delta region, it could be plausible that either of these could hitchhike from elsewhere. The yellow-jacket does occur, but they're almost exclusively ground-nesters.


	3. Death From Above

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One of the dirigible crews deploys biological weapons against the enemy, but a close call nearly brings the ship down.

40 miles south of Yuma  
September 8, CY 20, 2018 AD

“Corporal,” said Captain Jose Garcia irritably, “I want that thing off my ship ASAP!”

“Si, Señor,” said Corporal Steve Davies. He checked a clipboard, peered through a spyglass at the enemy some four hundred feet below off the port bow, then made a minor course correction. They'd cut the drive power to reduce the risk of over-shooting the target and to minimize vibrations. “ETA...five minutes.”

“Damn...it's making me nervous.”

“Me, too, Señor.”

The 'thing' in question was a large, greenware jar perched on a drop platform mounted to the bow end of the gondola hanging beneath a C-71 Coho medium dirigible. The jar's lid, pierced with a few sixteenth-inch holes, was secured to its body with copious amounts of twine that would usually have been considered overkill. An ominous buzzing sound emanated from something beneath the lid. That something was a basketball-sized hornet nest...and they were furious! The nest had been very carefully retrieved at great risk in the wee hours of pre-dawn while the wasps were largely asleep, and placed directly into the jar. Dealing with them in the fall was particularly dangerous. It was the time of year during which the colony was focused on protecting the queens that would give rise to next year's colonies. They were consequently highly aggressive and the consequences of being anywhere near that jar when it broke would be severe.

Greenware was unfired ceramic clay and was very fragile—so much so that a jolt from any excessive turbulence would be enough to break it, freeing several hundred very angry hornets. The material was chosen to ensure that the container would shatter on impact. In fact, transporting it over land had been deemed so hazardous that Garcia and the other captains had to fly their ships to the nest collection sites early that morning.

Four dirigibles--three plying the eastern side of the Colorado and one to the west--each carried such a jar holding a large nest. Each jar was to be dropped on a target as an anti-personnel weapon. One of the ninja teams on the west bank had reported success using wasps as implements of mass disruption two days earlier. Captain Garcia's target was the King of the Neo-Mayan Empire, which army led the force headed for Yuma.

Davies walked to the bow of the gondola and peered through the targeting scope. He made some adjustments for ground-speed-equivalent and altitude, then placed his hand on the platform release lever. “Ready, Captain,” he said crisply, resisting the urge to eye the jar.

Suddenly the whole ship lurched as a gust of wind on an otherwise calm day dragged violently at the envelope. Garcia's eyes widened and he felt a surge of adrenaline as the jar tottered threateningly on the platform. “Corporal,” he said nervously, “now would be a good time.”

Davies pulled the release lever and the platform abruptly dropped out from under the jar. It hung in the air for a moment before gravity caught it and dragged it downward. Davies watched through his spy-glass. After a few minutes, he let out a whoop. “Yee-haw! They're really mad, now, Señor!”

Garcia stepped over and took the spyglass from the Corporal and peered through it himself. Far below, a large, wooden roof covered the Imperial command staff. Each invading army had taken to dismantling ships to form wooden coverings to shield their most senior commanders from bombardment. The Confederation War Council suspected the enemy would have done that anyway in response to the more conventional range weapons from archers and war engines. Consequently, the selected target area had been directly in front of the Imperial shield.

The jar had fallen several yards further forward of the intended impact center, but Garcia could see that it had been more than adequate. He watched as a cloud of furious wasps mercilessly attacked anyone and anything within a fifty-yard radius, including those beneath the shield. According to his briefing, only those allergic to bee venom or stung too many times would be at risk of death. The others would be in severe pain for days and not at their best during the siege. That would give the Yumans another needed advantage.

Garcia watched the pandemonium on the ground before motioning other crew-members to come over and take a look at their handiwork. He felt it was important for his people to see the results of their work. They were too far up to hear anything, especially above the whir of the still-spinning drives, but the view through the spyglass spoke for itself. One by one, each person, including those on station as pedalers, took a look at the flailing, roiling mass of their foe running around and waving frantically at barely-seen wasps. Like those on the western bank, the enemy here had also taken to spreading out in response to the fire-bombing. That didn't matter with wasps and the Captain let out a great laugh as he watched his people grinning with excitement and exchanging fist-bumps.

“Al right,” said Garcia at last, “bring her up to one-half Impulse.”

The people poised on their seats—lean, long-distance-runner types—began to pedal. Garcia felt the vibration as four turbo-fan jet engines—stripped down to just the fans and enough housing to keep them stable—caught power from their drivers and began to spin up from neutral.

“Corporal,” he continued, “our next target?”

Davies consulted the clipboard. “Cavalry unit, one-half-mile south...then catapult battery behind it, Señor.” The enemy had also begun placing roofing over their siege engines as well. Extreme precision was necessary to address that counter-strategy. The objective was to drop a fire-bomb immediately in front of an engine, so close to it that it would not have time to come to a halt before rolling over the flames. So far, it had been somewhat effective.

The next phase of the Confederation's counterstrike strategy was to involve spreading an un-burned mixture of kerosene and napalm laced with magnesium filings along the roadbed for many miles, as well as upon any enemy units standing on it. The day before the bulk of the enemy force was expected to hit the city wall, dirigibles would perform a precisely-coordinated bombing. The goal was to ignite all the kerosene right under the enemy all at once.

The plan involved some assumptions and unknown variables. It assumed most of the enemy would be somewhere in the center of the road, which was a gamble given that they were now prone to spreading out. It also assumed they wouldn't notice, which was arguable given the general smelliness of kerosene. It further assumed the enemy wouldn't accidentally ignite it while they were camped, rather than on the road. It was not known known much kerosene would soak into those portions of the road paved with gravel or with nothing at all and how quickly this might occur, despite the surreptitious tests that had been conducted over the last few days.

Delivering the material effectively was also expected to be tricky. The plan relied upon a thick enough covering to produce enough fire to injure and destroy. Most of it was to be deployed from dirigibles cruising at three hundred feet. In addition, one of the SR-55 Orcas was being outfitted with a tank of the liquid. That ship was to make a pre-dawn flight, spraying its contents onto the road from a single-digit-yard altitude. It would be a very high-risk mission, one Garcia was glad not to have been assigned.

He looked several miles ahead at a huge airship hovering just slightly lower than his own. He felt a twinge of envy. Everyone in the Confederation Air Force wanted to serve on that vessel. General Harris had named it “Executor,” which was apparently some sort of pre-Change inside joke. It was a monstrosity said to be half again as large as one called _Hindenburg_ that was said to have plied the skies a century ago. That ship had been a shade longer than eight hundred feet with a diameter in excess of a hundred feet.

The _Executor_ had a somewhat different design. It was some twelve hundred feet long and one hundred fifty feet in diameter, with a frame more fish-shaped than the dirigibles of old. All six of its gondolas hung below the envelope, each connected to the other via a catwalk. The fore-most one held two small propellers, which were mounted on swivels—their function was mainly to assist with steering and stability. Behind that was the Bridge, apparently a reference to sailing ships or to something called Star Trek. The two amidships were mounted close to each other--one of them carried stored payload and the other delivered that payload. The two toward the rear of the craft were dedicated to propulsion—one of them drove four stripped-down turbofan engines and the one at the rear held a pair of belt-driven, fully-functional, high-bypass turbofan engines retrofitted with oil burners and special fiber shielding to protect the adjacent envelope.

It dwarfed the B-29 Enola heavy dirigible that cruised two miles behind it. At five hundred feet, the Enola, of which there were two—the other one engaging the force to the west—had a pair of oil-burning turbo-prop engines, salvaged from C-130 Hercules aircraft and retrofitted for dirigible use. Their downward-pointing exhaust assisted with overall lift, which helped increase payload capacity.

Garcia turned his attention back to his own mission. War machines like the ships that hung in the air raining destruction upon the enemy were, along with the trebuchets and such being readied for the defense, of the kind no one ever wished to have to employ. The smaller airships were used frequently for things like police action, couriers, high-speed tactical transportation, remote rescue and salvage operations, and anything else for which ground operation was ill-suited.

Target after target, Captain Garcia and his crew dropped their lethal cargo upon their foe. The miles slipped by, passing far beneath his feet. Always, the nearly-endless trail of enemy soldiers stretched out along the road like army ants hungry for the blood of his friends and family. There were so many. Hour after hour, he and his cohorts rained down fire and death. They were four days into the campaign and still the enemy came, seemingly undaunted, though his superiors assured him that was not the case. Enemy losses were currently estimated to be somewhere in the range of forty thousand altogether, friendly casualties still only less than twenty and no civilian deaths reported.

With their ordnance expended, it was time to return to Yuma. “Slow to one-quarter Impulse,” said Garcia. He waited while the airship slowed. “Come about, one-eighty degrees.” He watched as the nose of his ship swung eastward, the Executor still on its way to the coast, escorted by two F-4 Kestrel fighters—a somewhat generous designation for a dirigible, according to certain old-timers--to wreak further damage there.  
He returned his attention to their new course. He waited while the ship turned—slowly, like the great iron warships of old—until its nose again pointed northward. “Trim up,” he commanded. It groaned as the rudder forced its will upon the rest of it. “Ahead one-half.”

The fans whirred and the ship lurched forward. He watched as the ship re-traced its path, now above the road's eastern edge. The smoke from the collective air strikes rose from the road into the sky. The tops of the plumes caught an upper-level wind shear, flattening out as the particles dragged northwestward. Other dirigibles were ahead and off their port bow. He mentally projected their respective paths. “Helm, adjust course fifty meters east.”

“Fifty east, aye!” Some found it interesting that nautical procedures were used in vessels that flew. Garcia and an increasing number of people failed to see the irony of it.

The ship drifted out fifty meters, then trimmed up to continue its northward journey. “Corporal, if you wouldn't mind?” said Garcia, holding out a crossbow.

“With pleasure, Señor,” said Davies as he took the weapon.

Garcia picked up another and the two of them took position on the port side of the gondola. They had five hundred bolts between them. Cock-load-aim-release...cock-load-aim-release...over and over for the next half-hour. With just the two of them shooting from the bare edge of range, their kill rate was very low, but every one counted. Garcia estimated fifty or sixty. The dedicated gunships would probably do better.

They were startled by a loud, metallic _BANG_ against bottom of the gondola.

“Madre de Dios!” exclaimed Garcia. “What the hell was that?!”

“I don't know, Señor,” said Davies.

They both looked down, scanning the enemy. Another blur of something shot up from a knot of soldiers at the edge of the road. A ripping noise off the port bow caught his attention.

“Señor, look!” Davies pointed forward.

Garcia looked, just in time to see a large, arrow-headed javelin fall from a hole in the envelope. “Dammit!” he exclaimed. “When did they get anti-aircraft?!”

“It's a good thing hydrogen leaks UP, Señor,” said Davies.

“It still catches on fire, Corporal.”

Another javelin blurred upward and bounced off the fan housing with another loud _BANG._

“Helm! Hard to starboard! And get us some altitude!”

A fourth javelin shot upward and lodged between sets of fan blades, the whole thing making a horrible screeching sound. A few sparks flew off in random directions.

“Madre de Dios!” said Garcia. “Emergency stop! Helm, cut the belt to that fan! Corporal, hand me one of the RPG's!” The devices they'd named after pre-Change rocket-propelled grenades were pint-sized containers of napalm fixed to the end of a long crossbow bolt.

Davies grabbed one, handed it to his Captain, and pulled out a lighter, standing by to light the device. Garcia gave the signal and Davies lit the wick. The trouble with firing crossbow bolts in a downward trajectory, especially ones as tip-heavy as the RPG's, was that they slid easily out of the weapon. He had to quickly aim and fire, with little to no hold time. They also flew differently than standard bolts.

He aimed, released, and watched it fall...not a direct hit, but close enough to get the enemy off his six. “Helm, adjust for loss of port nacelle.” Where did the General come up with this stuff? “Take us out of range, best speed.”

“Si, Señor!”

The gondola shook from being out-of-balance, but she responded well enough. He and his crew were out of the fight for now. They'd receive further instructions during debriefing after they'd landed and during mission briefing in the morning. For now, he and Davies would spell their pedalers.


	4. Do or Do Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buffy rallies her people and then it's game-on!

Stronghold of Yuma  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

The sun had not yet crested over the city wall. It was an impressive wall, though not one built to endure a siege. On the contrary, it had been designed to withstand the crushing power of water from massive flooding, both seasonal and sudden. Its foundation rested directly upon the granite bedrock beneath the layer of alluvial sand and dirt on which the city had been platted. On that were stacked blocks of granite, quartzite and limestone that rose a hundred feet into the air, their exterior surfaces then plastered with a foot of ferro-concrete. It was straight on the inside, just like one would expect from a wall. The outside was roughly J-shaped, six feet thick on top, with a broad, curving apron dropping from the upper wall and then feathering out at the base.

The towers around the perimeter were built against the inside, not jutting out from it the way they did in most fortified towns throughout the Changed world. The wall's ever-curving contour, broken only in three places to allow passage via laminated steel gates, was designed not to repel water per se, but to shed and redirect it around the city. Every fortified town in every riparian zone throughout the Confederation had a wall like it, usually built in proportion to the water it would be expected to handle.

The wall itself was also jointed to allow differential motion of the overall structure. The whole thing could flex and move in response to the seismic activity in a region sandwiched between the San Andreas Fault to the north and the Gulf of California Rift to the south.

It had taken over three years to build the wall. It was put to the most grueling test in the fourth Change Year when Glen Canyon Dam failed, taking out Hoover, Davis, and Parker Dams, and abruptly delivering an estimated nine cubic miles of water and debris onto the Colorado River flood-plain. Over half of the pre-Change City of Yuma--that portion not surrounded by the wall--had been wiped off the map. Other walled cities in the valleys of the Gila River had also experienced such tests when dams north and east of the Phoenix ruins had failed in subsequent years. Salvage operations from the outwash events were still ongoing.

High WarLady Buffy Harris stood at the north end of the Yuma Airfield, the Scythe of Slayer Power resting on her right shoulder. She could feel its weight through the ten-gauge steel plate armor and the padding beneath it. Before her stood her people...nearly all of them, including some who had, according to protocol, come from nearby lightly- or un-fortified communities in response to the invasion. Every man, woman, and child in the city—with the exception of those actively working with the dirigibles—had turned out to hear her.

To her left, her twin daughters Joyce and Anya stood at-ease. Both girls, as daughters of the Prime Slayer, were Slayers themselves. Their un-strung war bows rested against their shoulders. The staves, tapered though they were, could easily be confused for bo-staff weapons, except that they were ten feet long. Each end was reinforced with a steel cap shaped to accommodate the eighth-inch diameter braided-steel cable that served as the string. That cable was necessary to handle the stave's jaw-dropping, skull-crushing, armor-shattering, half-ton draw. The arrows they propelled were four-foot-long, one-inch-diameter javelins fletched with eagle and condor feathers. Such weaponry turned the two of them into human war engines. They'd named their bows, as warriors are wont to do—Joyce named hers “Bifrost” after the rainbow bridge of Norse mythology and Anya named hers “Sparkle Pony” for reasons that she alone knew.

To her right stood Xander and Willow, slightly behind her Andrew, Chao-Ahn and General Davis. All of them wore full plate armor. Buffy and the twins had the standard heavy, ten-gauge plate worn by most Slayers. The other three Generals' was a bit lighter at fourteen-gauge. Willow's was classified as minimal, as she wasn't expected to be involved in actual combat, although she could still strap on additional pieces in the event that were to change. Their helms sat on the ground behind them and would be donned at the last minute.

Buffy looked around and then hefted the Scythe from her shoulder, holding it out to her side. She took a deep breath and addressed the assembly. Her Slayer powers affected every muscle in her body, including her diaphragm, giving her excellent projection. “Friends! Yumans! Fellow citizens of the Confederation!” She paused.

“We love you, Buffy!” called a female voice somewhere in the crowd.

Buffy and Xander glanced at each other, smiling slightly. Xander raised both eyebrows before Buffy continued.

“Twenty years ago, the Change took much from us...our way of life, our friends, our families, our loved ones, our very world! This day, we are besieged by an enemy who would come to finish the job!”

A chorus of boos erupted from the crowd. Buffy waited for them to die down before continuing.

“Within the hour, I walk through those gates...” She motioned behind her. “...to defend my home, my children, my family!”

“I'll fight for you, Buffy!” called a man.

“No!” She shook her head. “Look at the person next to you...fight for _them!_ For they are your neighbor, your friend, your family! Fight for _your_ home... _your_ family... _your_ friends... _your_ freedom... _your_ life!”

“Buf- _fy!_ ” called a man.

“Buf- _fy!_ ” answered another.

Within minutes, the entire assembly was chanting, “Buf- _fy!_ Buf- _fy!_ Buf- _fy!_ ” over and over.

Xander leaned over to his wife. “Remember what I said about everyone loving you?”

Buffy raised an eyebrow at him.

He grinned. “Told ya so.”

She smiled broadly, then turned back to the people and held up a hand. The chanting slowly died down. “So...how many of them can we make die?!”

A great cheer went up. As it faded, someone began to sing....

“Axes flash, broadswords swing.”

Several more voices picked up the song. “Shining armor's piercing ring.”

Most of the rest came in with the third line. “Horses run with polished shield.”

Then the rest joined. “Fight those bastards till they yield.”

Everyone, including Buffy and her Staff—and, she was pretty sure, those working at the dirigibles across the field--continued to sing the entirety of “The March of Cambreadth.” She looked at Xander, then at Willow, then over at Dawn—also clad in light armor--at the front of the crowd with the younger of Buffy's children as well as her own. With the unspoken words exchanged between them, she knew in that moment that not all magic was mystical. She raised the Scythe above her head as she sang.

All assembled—and Buffy could have sworn even those few in the city _not_ assembled—bellowed the final line of the final verse, “ _HOW MANY OF THEM CAN WE MAKE DIE?!_ ” drowning out the noise of tens of thousands of enemy feet already audible from three miles away. She wasn't sure herself, but Willow later told her she could actually feel the ground shake with that shout.

*****

Twenty minutes later, the city had transformed itself into a human ant colony. People scurried here and there, frantically finalizing last-minute preparations for the impending onslaught. Everyone had reported to their superiors as per the protocols. All understood that their very survival was at stake. No one was without a job.

Regular Army personnel lined up at attention, ready to disperse to their posts at the gates or along the wall. Most of them would meet the enemy within a half mile of the city. The plan was to gradually fall back to the gates, rather than try to push against the still-overwhelming force that stood against them. Yuma's Army and Militia combined would still be crushed in a toe-to-toe fight and those who would normally have come from the west bank were supporting the El Centro citadel. The objective was to whittle away at the enemy even more, while giving them a false sense of impending victory. Once back inside the gates, everyone would be in siege mode.

Andrew was at the stables, barking orders at everyone, and personally helping to ready camel, horse, and chariot. He was to lead the Cavalry out the eastern gate and repeatedly rake the enemy's flank. Their job would be highly dangerous, as they would not have the cover of the wall at any time during the entire duration of the siege.

Chao-Ahn was metaphorically herding cats. All Militia members had undergone basic and periodic training as required, and Chao-Ahn drilled them hard. Most still lacked the hardened discipline of the regular Army. They would fulfill a variety of roles: pike wall alongside the regular Army phalanx units during the initial engagement; archers on the ground, in chariots, and later on the wall; fight along secondary scrimmage lines. In the unlikely event that the wall was breached, they would join the Army to become part of a nascent first line of defense.

Xander had begun making laps around the city on camel-back checking on war engine readiness. He'd trained his teams well, and hadn't had to do very much. His engineers wouldn't have much to do until the gates had closed anyway. After that, Xander expected to have his hands full and be up to his elbows in running engines...and he wouldn't have had it any other way. Buffy's hands-on, front-and-center leadership style had rubbed off on him, as well as on most others in positions of command responsibility. He'd been talking about grounding the dirigible fleet and had already given the order to hangar the _Executor_ upon its next return. He disliked the idea and it made everyone else nervous, but the wind had been picking up enough that air operations were becoming increasingly problematic.

Willow had retreated into one of the Army buildings with several other witches to begin working the shielding spell. They would need the peace and quiet in order to adequately concentrate. The shield was tricky. It could be calibrated to repel fast-moving objects, or slow-moving objects, but not both at the same time. The plan called for dropping the shield at specific times to allow outgoing projectiles to strike the enemy. The shield also had to be held at a particular distance from the wall—too close and it would be a danger to friendlies, too far and it would have diminished effectiveness. Maintaining it would be tiring and they had to make sure that if they didn't have the energy to hold it, they could drop it completely, rather than letting it contract inside the wall.

The several dozen Slayers, including those who'd been with the ninja teams, were assigned to one of the several military divisions involved in the second defense phase—the first having been the successful air and ninja assaults. Most of them would be part of the first engagement outside the wall, then take up their seven-hundred-pound war bows and spread out at strategic positions around the city's perimeter. Buffy herself prepared to lead the Army out the front gate.

Civilians were to support the Army and Militia. Those not taking care of children and the elderly in specified areas at the city's core would be carrying food, water, and ammunition to the front lines, then carrying the dead and wounded away. Those civilians with medical training were to assist Army medics with the wounded.

Everyone, both in armor and not, was running on nerves...or adrenaline...or caffeine.


	5. Cavalry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brigadier General Andrew Wells leads the Yuma cavalry against the invading army.

Sand flats south of Yuma  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

Brigadier General Andrew Wells sat his horse at the head of the Yuma cavalry. Like most in the region, his was an Arabian. Seven hundred Arabians, a hundred and fifty chariot teams, two hundred of the Estrellan destrier heavy horse, and five hundred camels rode with him. Nearly all of the equestrians from the outlying areas had arrived and he hoped a few more would show. He was still expecting the other two thousand Estrellan destriers. _Where the hell ARE they?_ he thought. _We NEED them!_

They'd all gone over the plan. Their job was to impair the enemy's ability to replenish the men they'd be losing while assaulting the city. With the impending grounding of the air force, the equestrian role was that much more critical. Much of it depended on the delicate balance the Yuman preemptive strike had established. A mounted warrior's two worst enemies were projectiles, and pike-and-shield wall. That dictated how he'd use his people.

There wasn't a whole lot that could be done about thrown weapons. The Mesoamericans had archers, spear-throwers, and bolo-throwers. All were dangerous. Andrew's mounted and chariot archers would fire first at enemy archers, then at spear-throwers, then at bolo-throwers. Otherwise, a rider simply had to hunker down with shield up and take it until within point-blank range.

The air strikes had forced the enemy to spread out. As long as the dirigibles could be kept in the air, the enemy would be deterred from doing the kind of clumping necessary to both form an effective shield wall and to swarm the Yuman defenders. Andrew's cavalry would simply head into thinner portions of the enemy line and mow through them like a pre-Change combine.

There was no way they'd long survive a toe-to-toe, knock-down, drag-out fight with the entire enemy force. Even the Yuman phalanx units bracing for the first engagement were to withdraw into the city after not more than an hour or so. A horse or camel's strength came from its speed while in motion, making such a fight poorly-suited to them anyway. Fortunately, they only needed to address one point of the line at a time.

Andrew surveyed his potential target areas for thin points in the enemy line. There were plenty of those, as the enemy column was still strung out over dozens of miles of road. He took a deep breath, held it, then slowly let it back out again. There were just so _many_ of them and Andrew wasn't sure if his opponents looked more intimidating viewed end-wise from the wall or side-wise from the ground. He wasn't sure it mattered. He could only deal with a small portion of it at a time anyway and as long as his people could avoid being swarmed, they still had hope of eking out a victory.

Smoke still rose from multiple places along the road. The napalm sprayed on it hadn't burned as hoped, probably because too much of it had soaked into the gravel, dirt and sand. Instead, it had mostly smoldered, producing a lot of thick, black smoke, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. A large portion of the enemy were suffering smoke inhalation, which would impair their ability to fight. The smoke also made it difficult for the enemy to see, which would make it easier for Andrew and his teams to approach closer before being counter-attacked. Unfortunately, it also made it difficult to see the enemy, which had the potential to mask unforeseen troop movements. Most importantly, the road-sprayed napalm had resulted in far fewer losses than had been hoped. Andrew had little choice but to accept it as all part of the calculated risks every commander must take in time of war.

Andrew glanced upward, noting the location of the nearest airship and its relation to the enemy's troop configuration, then discussed his assessment with his division commanders. Little was necessary, as most of the conceivable scenarios had been covered before leaving the city. Only the particular details remained and there were few of those. Andrew's commanders saluted him and dispersed to bring their groups into configuration.

“May the Force be with us!” he called after them.

Andrew took a deep breath and settled his helm in place, fastening the chin strap. The Estrellans used sallet helms, but the Brigadier General found the loss of peripheral vision annoying, not to mention the way those closed-faced helms amplified the effects of the desert heat. He, along with Chao-Ahn, preferred what Medievalists called Norse-style helms, while the charioteers favored Corinthian design. Consequently, most of the cavalry and militia used either of these types, or a hybrid of the two. Everyone wore the taupe-colored desert camo, down to the coverings of their helms. Everything metal that could glint in the sunlight was either covered with cloth or dulled with matte paint. It wouldn't make them invisible, but neither did they want to advertise their presence prematurely. Every minute of lead time would be one minute fewer the enemy had to get themselves into a defensible position.

He watched as his people moved into position, then gave the command to advance. He watched the chariot line move around from the rear and come up to a trot. He gave another command and waited for the destriers to come up to a canter, watching them spread out to reduce the potential for a domino effect should a horse in front go down. Then as one, the Arabian horse and camel went from walk, then trot, then to canter.

At two hundred yards, he saw a ripple of arrows and bolts arc out from the chariot line. He watched as the answering arrows crossed in mid-flight. A few horses went down, their chariots spilling their occupants onto the sand, the horses behind them swerving to miss them. Screams floated across the flat.

At one hundred yards, the destriers' lance heads swept down to level as they brought their mounts to a full gallop. Then the chariots peeled off, still hurling arrows and bolts, one or two going down or a rider falling out here and there. Andrew raised his shield, drew his sword and focused, his knees supplying direction to his horse.

More arrows shot outward from the enemy. One hissed uncomfortably past his ear. The occasional _THUNK_ of arrow-against-shield was audible above the rumble of hooves. He fought the urge to flinch as a loud _BANG_ rang off his shield, the tip of an arrow suddenly protruding from its inner surface. That was too close. He felt a new rush of adrenaline. A scream sounded off to his right as someone went down, then another to his left. The real thing really _was_ different from practice! He quickly shoved that thought to the back of his mind.

A thousand more arrows arced over him, as they answered the enemy. Arrows crossed in mid-air and a second flight was already on its way before the first struck. More of his people went down, the scream of man and beast merging together. He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on his sabre.

At fifty yards, horses and camels tightened their formation. A loud _WHOOSH_ sounded as a spear rushed past his head, then a _CRACK_ as his horse kicked the shaft of another stuck in the sand. He ducked a bolo, one of its balls ringing loudly off the side of his helm.

Seconds later, they hit with many thousands of pounds of force. The noise was deafening. The destriers in front of him crashed into a thin shield wall, the clash of steel, hooves, and splintering wood like a thunderclap. The screams of men filled his ears as he and his fellow riders mowed through and out the other side. The Estrellans had plowed the road well enough that Andrew's sword did not taste blood. He did not expect that to last long.

Just like they'd practiced, they reigned up slightly at a hundred yards, and wheeled around, still maintaining formation. Arrows and spears whistled overhead as the enemy fired at him. A squeal told him when another mount had gone down. Returning to a gallop, they rushed the enemy again as bolts rained down from a dirigible.

Fire flared up off to the right from a fire-bomb. The wind suddenly shifted and blew smoke toward him. He coughed. They had little choice but to charge into a now-obscured enemy line. Projectiles lanced outward. He felt the force of an arrow as it hit him in the arm. Miraculously, it caught him in his padding, dragging at it as it exited. That was more than close enough to last him the rest of the day and then some. He picked up his saddle bow, returned fire, then switched back to his sword just in time to hit them again.

He watched the Estrellans disappear into the smoke, he and the Arabians right behind them. The smoke still burned his eyes as he emerged from it. The enemy was still reeling from the previous clash, but had otherwise recovered surprisingly quickly. The arrow-storm from above had let up to allow the Confederation cavalry to engage the Mesoamericans without risking losses from friendly fire.

Andrew had only seconds to evaluate the situation before their lines again met with another crash of steel, hooves, and wood. More death followed in his wake and his sword came away red. The camel archers behind him widened the gap in the enemy line as they loosed hundreds of arrows to either side.

Horse and camel rode between the chariots, which crews began firing arrows to cover the other riders. The principle strength of a chariot was that its occupants could fire arrows in any direction at any time, regardless of the movement of the vehicle. It could also remain in operation, even with the loss of one or more occupants and its high, armored sides provided more protection than a fully-exposed equestrian, who had to rely on body armor that had the unfortunate side-effect of limiting mobility. All of that made the chariot more or less the equivalent of a pre-Change tank or Humvee, despite their terrain limitations.

Andrew reined his horse about. “Reform the line!” he shouted. Horse and camel crisply executed the command as he searched for their next target and evaluated his force's condition. The bad news was that they were taking losses. He'd expected that, but he'd also expected to have twice as much manpower. The good news was that they were doing better than he'd feared and that the chariots were proving to be at least as effective as he'd anticipated. He had yet to see how the balance might shift once the Mesoamericans had time to adapt, which could easily include dealing with an equestrian response. They may only have another couple of rounds of the current approach before they'd have to change tactics and adjust battle plans. He really wasn't looking forward to what he knew to be the inevitable point in any battle: hit then yell, yell then hit, hit while yelling. They'd only just had the first engagement and the Powers alone knew how long the campaign would last.

“All right, boys and girls,” he said loudly, “may the Force be with us! Charge!” As before, the chariots lurched forward, followed by the destriers, Arabians, and camels.


	6. Enemy at the Gates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Like so often happens in war, some things just don't go as planned.

South Gate, Stronghold of Yuma  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

High Warlady Buffy Harris stood in the center of the road leading south from Yuma. She used the same no-nonsense stance she'd adopted back in Sunnydale, the one that said, “Go ahead...make my day!” She glared at the enemy through the opening in the front of her modified Corinthian helm. She was already starting to sweat and she was quite certain it was going to be an extremely long, hot, and exhausting day and that every scrap of padding she wore would be completely drenched long before sunset.

The South Gate was a hundred yards behind her and standing wide open. Yuman soldiers, a mix of regular Army and militia, flanked her, forming a semi-circle of Spartan-type shield wall and pike extending from the slightly-raised gravel road-bed over seventy yards in either direction. The enemy had not yet advanced from the crossroads they occupied, which would take them to the East and West Gates respectively.

The Yumans could easily be flanked, but there was nothing but sand, some mud, and a few patches of quicksand on the flats flanking the raised roads. Buffy was gambling that the enemy would not know where those spots were and that they wouldn't be equipped to move well in normal sand. Doing so was tricky and tiring and every member of the Southwest Confederate Army spent long hours training on sand, learning how to move and fight effectively upon it.

She watched as a man on horseback rode out from the enemy line, crisply and confidently crossing the hundred-or-so yards between armies to stop a few paces in front of Buffy. Unlike most of the other Mesoamerican soldiers, he wore full armor, most of it hard leather, save for a polished stainless-steel breastplate, the cloth underneath it brightly colored, and a plume of gaudy feathers sticking up from the center of his helm.

“None shall pass!” announced Buffy in defiance.

“Oh, I really think we will,” said the man in heavily-accented English.

“You've already underestimated us,” said Buffy. “Do you really wish to continue underestimating?”

“Do you really wish to continue resisting?” countered the man. “There's really no reason for _all ___of you to die.”

“Back at ya,” said Buffy flatly.

“Surrender or die,” said the man, his tone somewhat mocking.

“Gee, let me think,” said Buffy, her tone equally mocking. “I think...” She paused, then abruptly swung the Scythe in a powerful, upward arc. It caught the man's horse under its ribs. With Slayer strength powering the blow, her blade cut through the animal's torso, up through the saddle, and thence up and out the rider's abdomen, trailing blood and viscera. Droplets of blood and peritoneal fluid sprayed into the air, sparkling in the sunlight as man and beast went down screaming. Buffy moved aside as they crashed to the ground, then stepped over to where he lie dying beneath his twitching horse.

“I think, die,” she said, then shoved the stake end of the Scythe between the man's ribs, through a lung, and into the ground beneath. She held it there, watching his eyes widen with the pain. She watched blood trickle from his mouth as he choked on it, his breath turning it to a pink foam, then roughly pulled the stake back out, fresh bloody froth bubbling out through the hole. She spat on him, then turned and strode back to her own line.

Slayer Violet leaned over. “I guess that concludes negotiations,” she said matter-of-factly.

Buffy chuckled ruefully. “Yup...I guess,” she said, an obvious note of irony in her voice. Then she raised her voice to address the opposing army. “Look, I know you all really don't want to be here. You'd rather be home making love to your women and playing with your children, am I right?” Silence answered her. “Now, you can all go home to those wives and children, or this can be the part where you continue to die! Is this _really ___a good day for that? It's your call!”

A shout of defiance answered her and the opposing force began to advance, first at a walk, then a trot, then a full run.

“Dammit,” muttered Buffy. “Heads up!” she called. She raised the Scythe and hundreds of Yuman shields snapped up, locking together. Fighters in the second rank raised shields over the first rank to form a roof while others held pikes—double-tapered thrusting heads mounted on stout poles--protruding between small gaps in the shield-wall like a great steel porcupine. Everyone braced for the coming impact.

That collision broke against the shield wall like a wave upon rock. The force of it pushed every shield-bearer back several feet as boots skidded on gravel, dirt, and sand. Pike-bearers also slid back, tightening their grips on their weapons as the pressure of metal-on-armor and metal-on-bone threatened to wrest the poles from their hands. Screams of impaled Mesoamericans rose into the air and the Yumans pushed back enough to slow the enemy advance. Enemy spears bounced off Yuman shields, loud BANGS echoing behind them, the sharp impacts jarring bone and joint.

Buffy plunged the stake end of the Scythe into a man's chest. He fell back, blood pouring from his new hole. Another took his place and she staked him, too. He fell back, another took his place, only to fall, over and over, until the progression of enemy dead by Buffy's hand merged into a near-continuous fountain of blood. She'd long ago stopped cringing when killing humans. She still hated doing it, though, and she knew in her heart that it would never be even remotely the same as killing demons or dusting vamps.

She dodged an enemy blade and grabbed the arm holding it. With a quick, off-handed jerk, she tore it from its socket, blood spraying everywhere, and flung it back into the mass of enemy soldiers, Slayer strength behind it sure to injure someone. The arm's erstwhile owner collapsed, screaming. She caught an incoming javelin and hurled it through the nearest foe, driving it through his chest and into the man behind him. In the same motion, she smashed the haft of the Scythe one-handed into another's face, caving in his skull.

The silica grit of dust mixed with the iron tang of blood as both filled Buffy's nose, and the crash and ring of steel-on-steel mixed with screams of men filled her ears while the battle dragged on. As her people were killed or injured, armored noncombatant personnel carried them back through the gate and to the nearest of several designated medical points well behind the anticipated combat zones. With each loss, the Yuman shield arc contracted bit by bit, gradually falling back toward the wall.

From time to time, the wind shifted, clearing enough of the dust to give Buffy a glance at the enemy army marching along the other roads toward the other gates. She didn't have more than a moment or two to spare before returning her attention to the fight at-hand. Her people were holding their lines better than she'd have expected. Maybe she should have, though, since she had good and dedicated people in charge of training and her people were defending their home with savage aggression. The kill-to-loss rate was better than 5-to-1. That was pretty good, but not good enough...not in a prolonged toe-to-toe fight, anyway. Her people would drop from exhaustion long before the enemy ran out of soldiers. Their fighting wasn't very good and Buffy figured they hoped to win on sheer numbers...and they still could, but she'd make them pay very dearly.

After an hour, the line was within twenty meters of the gate, about where Willow's shield would be once the signal was given. The enemy was having trouble negotiating the piles of their own dead. That was just as well, since her people were already tiring and the current phase of the defense had already taken far longer than the Yuman Joint Chiefs had expected.

Buffy turned and nodded to the three Slayers behind her. She dropped to a knee and they let loose with a volley of arrows. In the space of under a half-minute, Slayer speed sent several dozen of their half-inch arrows hurtling through the gap Buffy had occupied a moment before. Propelled by the seven-hundred-pound war bows, their bodkin heads punched through armor, flesh, and bone several ranks deep as though through paper, their blood splashing all over their comrades.

Buffy rose again, just in time to meet several enemy fighters bounding over the growing mountain of corpses. She raised the Scythe, blocking a downward swing. She pushed back hard, twisting a little to punch a gauntleted hand into her opponent's face. She pivoted slightly to decapitate another, a ruddy fountain marking where his head had been moments before. Another convulsed mid-air as an arrow sprouted from his eye socket and Buffy spun out of the way as he hit the ground. It was time to sound the retreat.

Timing would be critical. All Yuman personnel had to pass through the gate while still repelling the enemy. The gate then had to be shut. Normally, that would not be an issue. However, the enemy advance would complicate matters. The Yumans would not only have to beat them back, but also make sure nothing, bodies especially, blocked the gate. They'd have to do it with all three gates in order to achieve full and effective containment. They'd drilled the procedure over and over, addressing all foreseeable contingencies. They were ready.

Step by step, the Yumans backed up. The enemy continued to press them hard, trying to cut them down while still outside the wall. Now and then, Yuman soldiers dropped out of the line seemingly at random, contracting their formation further and adding to the enemy's false sense of impending victory.

At ten meters, Buffy yelled, “ _Now! ___”

She and the rest of the line dropped to their knees to reveal the soldiers who'd dropped back. They were some of Yuma's best archers and they held their weapons at the ready. The enemy checked their advance as they recognized the new threat. Arrows lanced outward. Most were the standard ones, some cross-bow, and a few the half-inch Slayer arrows. The front few ranks of Mesoamerican soldiers dropped like slaughtered cattle, some pinned to one or two of the fellows at their backs. Two more flights repeated the results and a pile of three hundred enemy bodies provided a fresh barricade. The Yumans fell back and Buffy felt a tingle as Willow's shield went up.

As anticipated, the Mesoamericans didn't initially advance. Instead, they sent a barrage of arrows, spears, and bolas at the retreating Yumans. All projectiles shattered upon reaching the horizon of Willow's shield. Another flight followed it and that, too, disintegrated. The attackers hesitated, then finally rushed the wall. By the time the first bounded over the pile of bodies, the gate was more than half closed, grinding along the salvaged railroad rails that supported the wheels guiding the door.

Attackers skidded to a halt near the shield, but slid past it unharmed, their shoes grating on the gravel. Emboldened by the realization that they hadn't been shredded like their high-speed projectiles, they rushed the gate, swords drawn, battle cries rising from their throats.

The other gates would be easier to seal. They were set into alcoves much like those in the Jerusalem wall. That orientation required anyone to make a sharp turn in order to enter. The design choice was intended to shelter the gates from flood-water, both to avoid damage to them and to reduce the work needed to clear debris following high-water events. It had the secondary effect of making battering rams impossible to use and shielding the door from most ranged attacks. It would also be a lot easier to create a bottleneck and give the operators time to close the heavy doors. The South Gate, on the other hand, faced straight outward and was the only way large or long loads could pass through the wall.

All three gates were built like huge sliding doors, six inches of laminated steel plating taken from rail cars, automobiles, tractors, and metal buildings, and then bolted and welded together. Each was supported by several wheels salvaged from railroad cars. The wheels were mounted on axles welded to the inside of the door and ran along a rail set in the ground. The bottom sat slightly below grade such that it was impossible for an enemy to pry it up. The top of the door was guided between sets of steel rollers. A large, hand-powered crank in the gate-house turned a series of winches and chains that, in turn, moved the door. When closed, a series of large I-beam bolts secured it.

Even if an enemy were able to dig out the ferro-concrete and lever the door's base, it was braced on each end. The only way to lift it was to remove a set of rails above the upper frame and crane it out, which was how it had been set into place originally and how it could be removed for maintenance. Even though all the rollers were kept well-lubricated, it still took several people working the crank shaft several minutes to close each door.  
Suddenly, the door lurched to an abrupt stop. Sizzling noises sounded from up above and a few sparks rained down from the upper housing, accompanied by some bright light. Buffy looked up, swore, and dashed into the gate-house.

“High Warlady!” one man exclaimed. “The door's stuck!”

“Yeah, I got that,” she growled, grabbing the lever and pushing. Even with Slayer strength, it wouldn't budge. “You're right...it's jammed. It looks like someone sabotaged the door. You...” she said to one, “...go get a cut-off wheel.”

“But that'll take...”

“Go! You...” she said to two others, “...grab hammers and go up and bang on it. Maybe that'll free enough of the slag to get this thing moving again.”

The men went to it, while she ducked back outside just in time to meet Xander.

“The other doors are closed,” he said. “What happened here?”

“Looks like someone set thermite on the rollers.”

Xander swore under his breath.

“Yeah,” said Buffy, “that and more.”

“Who the hells got in here to sabotage us?”

“Beats me,” growled Buffy, “but if they're still alive, they're going to wish they weren't.”

Xander turned and started to go.

“Where are you going?”

“To get Joyce and Anya.”

“Oh, no you don't.”

“Look, I know you don't want them here...”

“Damned right I don't.”

“Buff, they've trained for this.”

“They were going to fight from range,” she protested. “The enemy wasn't supposed to breech the wall.”

“A lot of things weren't supposed to happen. I'm surprised I have to tell you that. Look, they're daughters of the Prime Slayer and we need them...and those bows of theirs. Besides, this is their home, too. They have just as much right as anyone here to defend it and you know it.”

Buffy eyed her husband for a moment. “Okay,” she conceded, “but I want them covered like white on rice, you got me?”

“Of course.” He placed a gauntleted hand on her shoulder, held if for a moment, then trotted off.

Buffy hoped Willow would be able to keep the shield up long enough for the enemy to run out of projectiles. She paused enough to listen to the sound of arrows, spears, javelins, rocks and so forth shattering against the shield. Then her attention turned to the line of defenders at the gate. She sighed, hoisted Scythe to her shoulder and prepared to make more of her enemy die.


	7. Sand in Our Hearts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> War is hell...literally.

Sand flats south of Yuma  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

Andrew Wells dragged another breath down his dry throat, even as the last cries of dying men, both friend and foe, faded away. But the more he killed, the more they just seemed to keep coming. He still wasn't sure if today was a good day to die, but it couldn't be that bad of a day for it, either. The steady drumming of hoof-beats cut through the echoes of his breath inside his helm and with it the voices of men chanting.

“Cut...cut... _cut_... _CUT!_ ”

“Now what?” he muttered. Whatever it was, he had a feeling things were about to go from bad to quite a bit worse. “Lieutenant!” he yelled.

“Señor!” came the reply from somewhere on his left. Moments later, its owner trotted into view, his armor and mount conspicuously blood-spattered.

Andrew looked toward the chanting. “We've got more company. Let's make them feel unwelcome.”

The man growled aggression, then turned to bark orders. A few minutes later, the remnants of Andrew's cavalry fell into a ragged line. About a third of their original number remained.

The wind shifted again, blowing lingering smoke away from the road and toward the river. Andrew's breath caught in his throat. A long line or horses at least three ranks deep cantered straight toward him. Each horse was fully barded, their riders in red breastplates blazoned with a rayed golden sun. The lowering sun glinted off their helms. They were clearly well-trained and highly organized.

Andrew cursed under his breath as his own tired men came up to a trot, then to a canter. Moments later, both lines accelerated to a full gallop and war cries again filled the air.

“Cut! Cut! _CUT!_ ”

Arrows flickered out from chariot and mounted archers. Andrew watched the enemy draw short saddle bows to send their own answer. As before, horse and rider fell screaming on both sides, members of the second enemy rank moving to fill in the gaps. The the air filled with the ring of steel as swords were drawn, and then they met, tens of thousands of pounds of flesh and steel slamming against one another. The noise was deafening.

A solid impact rang his helm like a bell. A brief, but intensely familiar pressure jarred his sword arm and his blade trailed an arc of glimmering blood droplets through the air. His horse screamed and the world tilted quickly forward. He barely had time to kick free of the stirrups before meeting the ground in a well-practiced tuck-and-roll.

No matter how many times he'd drilled that maneuver, it always knocked the wind out of him. He pivoted around onto the balls of his feet, willing the air into his lungs. Shield and sword rose instinctively to a ready position even as he scanned for threats through the sweat and sand painfully working their way into all those sensitive places.

An enemy, thrown from his horse, rose to his own feet not four yards away. The man immediately charged Andrew, shete held high. He caught the strike on his shield, the wood splintering under the blow. A second blow jarred his arm, something in the back of his mind whispering that his shoulder was going to be screaming at him later. He shed a third blow partly with what remained of his shield, and partly with his vambrace.

He pivoted, then drove his sabre under the other man's chin, the sickening crunch of tissue and bone more felt than heard. He wrenched the blade free as the body fell backward onto the sand. Andrew shoved his body upright, panting.

Another man dismounted a dozen paces away. His shaven pate gleamed in the sun, his red robes standing out against the tawny sands around him. He strode confidently toward Andrew. The grin on his face made Andrew's skin crawl, but his face barely even twitched when the General sank his sword through the robes and between ribs.

The man reached out with one hand, clamped fingers around his neck, and lifted. The man's eyes met his own and he suddenly felt like he was falling into twin pools of such fathomless blackness as he'd never imagined, as though several hells had joined forces.

The voice that came out of his mouth was even worse. “ **I...SEE...YOU!** ”

Andrew pried at the vise-like grip. He might as well have been trying to bend the fingers of a marble statue. Then they squeezed. His gorget bent, the metal digging into the flesh of his neck. Then he felt something inside him crunch. His vision blurred as his lungs fought futilely for air.

The last thing he heard before blackness descended on him was that horrible voice: “ **I...SEE...YOU!** ”


	8. Risen From Her Own Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, upriver in Estrella, Contessa Kennedy has her own hands full.

Airfield, Stronghold of Yuma  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

General Xander Harris jogged across the tarmac. Despite years of organizing, troubleshooting, re-organizing, training, and drilling, he still felt like a headless chicken. But it robbed him of the mental bandwidth he'd otherwise be using to worry about his family. So the chaos of battle had certain advantages, though he supposed, at the back of his mind, that he may very well have a breakdown later, not unlike the one he'd had after the Battle of Sunnydale.

Another man sprinted at him from across the tarmac. “Señor!” he shouted. “Señor, Señor!” The Corporal was clearly agitated about something.

Xander came to a stop, willing his breathing to subside, an exercise that seemed more and more difficult with each passing year. “Yes, Corporal?”

“Señor, the beacons! They are lit, Señor!”

“Which ones?”

“From the east.”

Xander looked in that direction. A smoke plume rose into the azure sky from somewhere past the wall. He'd missed it in the chaos of the assault on Yuma. He grunted a curse. “Corporal, I want three fully-loaded Remoras in the air in twenty minutes.” He looked down the airfield at its wind sock, the sun-faded orange fabric fluttering from the top of a tall pole, and gaged the wind. “Correction, launch two Orcas first. Then the Remoras.”

The Corporal saluted, then spun around and ran toward the tactical control bunker.

Xander looked skyward and let out an exasperated sigh. They just might be able to pull this off. Yes, there were many days when he fervently wished the Universe would just leave him the hells alone.

* * *

Estrella  
Formerly ruins of Phoenix  
September 11, CY 20, 2018 AD

Contessa Kennedy Phoenix stood inside the Southern Watchtower perched on the southernmost toe of the Estrella Mountains. Its heavy corrugated sheet metal roof cast a welcome shade, a shade that let her use field glasses without worrying about the sun glinting off the lenses.

She pulled a cloth from her belt and wiped her brow. Even surrounded by two-foot-thick stacks of rock, sweat already trickled down her flanks. Her fiber armor, though much lighter than steel, didn't exactly breathe. Even if summers back at her childhood home in New York hadn't prepared her for sweating in Arizona in armor, she still welcomed the heat.

“Damn,” she said. “It wasn't enough.”

To the southeast, an army still at least ten thousand strong kicked up a cloud of dust along the old Interstate-10. That army had first been spotted a few days before, during its passage through the ruins of Tuscon. If not for a few nomads and the vagaries of the rumor grapevine, she would not have known about it until last night when the glow of fires had spilled over the hills north of Casa Grande.

That had been enough warning to scramble the three Remoras moored at Luke Air Base. The reports after a series of fly-bys had not been encouraging. A small band of Indians from the Mt. Lemmon area had harassed the invaders north of Tuscon. Later, horsemen from Ak-Chin had done the same. In both cases, the invaders had lost men, but the overall impact had been questionable and the army had kept going. Even worse, the enemy had retaliated. Smoke still rose from Ak-Chin.

Kennedy had ordered the Remoras loaded with incendiary devices to bomb the enemy. One advantage to living outside the ruins of one of the largest cities in the Southwest was an abundance of things that burned. Despite how much had gone up in flames the first week following the Change, it was still phenomenal the amount of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and so on that had been salvaged from all over the Phoenix Metro Area.

One of the dirigibles had been hastily retrofitted with a large tank filled with jet fuel and a pump sprayer, which its three-person crew had emptied over the invading army and then promptly lit on fire. Bombardment had continued around the clock for the last three days. But with only three light dirigibles and upwards of an eighty-mile round trip, the damage had been limited to perhaps a tenth of the overall force, plus an indeterminate amount of provisions and equipment. Kennedy had hoped for more. All three craft currently floated above the army, raining arrows down on it with marginal efficacy.

She swung the glasses toward the south. A second, much smaller plume of dust drifted up from just south of Seven-Mile Mountain.

“Hmm,” said Kennedy. She pointed. “See there?”

The woman beside her took the glasses and peered through them. Kennedy's aid—or administrative assistant, or head lady in waiting, depending on how one looked at it—Lieutenant April Hanover, also wore fiber armor, emblazoned with Kennedy's arms: Or, between three saguaro cacti vert, a rattlesnake proper. “They move like their masters' whips are at their backs,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, they do.” She chuckled. “And if they keep it up, their horses are going to drop dead in an hour.” She snorted. “Too bad they're out of trebuchet range.”

“Do they know about those?”

Kennedy shook her head. “I doubt it. I think they wanted to use Seven-Mile Mountain as a view blocker.”

“What now, Ma Donna?”

Kennedy blew air out through her lips, a gesture of pensive frustration. She was supposed to send her heavy horse down to Yuma. She'd already dispatched two divisions six days earlier, and a third division two days after that as their riders had assembled from all over the scattered communities of Estrella. But Yuma was a hundred and eighty miles distant. Even by flat-bottomed boat down the Gila River, it would take nearly a week. Given the sudden appearance of an invading army, Kennedy figured the remaining heavy horse would best be deployed defending Estrella.

In the Southwestern Confederation, heavy horse was relative. By the onset of the first winter after the Change, the riverbanks and abandoned agricultural land in and around the ruins had proven to be perfectly suited for horse pasture. Kennedy had started an equestrian breeding program. Two years later, Arab and Palomino horses had begun to produce large, sturdy colts with the best attributes of both. They were still a far cry from the big war destriers bred in Europe during the Middle Ages. But such animals would not have fared well in the central Arizona desert. That had been critical during the Wars of Unification.

“Light the beacon,” said Kennedy.

“Si, Ma Donna.” April ducked down the hatch in the tower's floor, her boots thumping on the steel traction plating of a spiral staircase that passed through the center of the structure.

The heliographer across the catwalk from the base of the lookout tower was to signal the heliographer atop Hayes Peak, who would then relay that signal to the Estrella Beacon keeper, who would pour a gallon of gasoline onto a pyramidal stack of old tires and torch it. The Robbins Butte Beacon keeper would see the smoke from the Estrella Beacon and repeat the process. And so on from ridge-top to ridge-top all the way to Yuma.

Kennedy didn't know what sort of help would be available. She assumed Yuma was tightly shut up. She also knew the army besieging that city was an order of magnitude larger than the one toiling toward her. But she was pretty sure they didn't know Estrella was currently under attack as well.

Even if Yuma managed to send a single dirigible, that would help. For the time being, however, she and her people were going to be busy with the invading army trudging across what had once been the Gila River Indian Reservation.

She stood there for several more minutes, watching the enemy and taking notes on a yellow pad with a number-2 pencil. It had been phenomenal how much of that sort of thing had been left behind when the local human population had crashed. Once she was satisfied with her observations, she nodded to the other man in the tower. “Let me know if anything changes,” she said.

She flew down the winding stair, her armor clacking lightly. Estrellan fiber armor was based on similar armor employed by many of the pre-Columbian peoples all up and down the Pacific Spine. Normally, one would weave each layer out of wool or flax, or some such. But the amount of bolt fabric salvaged from sewing supply stores was phenomenal. It only made sense, even if the first generation of fiber armor had come in calico, plaid, and paisley.

She stepped out of the tower, her boots crunching on the grey gravel that covered the wide gap between the central dry-stacked stone tower and the outer wall set on an adobe foundation. It had been erected toward the end of CY 1 atop a spire she'd renamed O'Hara Peak--for reasons she kept mostly to herself--in response to banditry more than anything. From that tower, an observer could have advanced warning of anyone trying to cover the vast expanses of flat, open ground surrounding the Sierra Estrella.

She and April walked through the main gate. Its single steel door remained open, and would until either night fell, or the site came under attack. From there, the path switchbacked more than four hundred torturous feet down to a small plateau that cradled the community supporting the watchtower.

The plateau, which took its name from the watchtower, was rimmed in sharp spires lower than O'Hara Peak. Between those, adobe walls several feet thick and fifty feet high in most places filled in the gaps. Dry-stacked stone battlements ringed many of the knobs, the wall itself crenelated and reinforced with rock.

Some people had been initially critical of Kennedy's decision to fortify O'Hara. It stood fifteen hundred feet above the surrounding valley floor, from which the rocky, cactus-studded, rattlesnake-and-scorpion-infested slopes of Sierra Estrella jutted precipitously toward the azure sky. No one, it had been argued, would be crazy enough to mount an assault up that.

But some bandits had done exactly that well into CY 2. After Kennedy had presented the Roman siege of Masada as an illustration, the people of O'Hara had reluctantly agreed to begin construction of their wall.

Kennedy and April wound through what passed for the town streets, narrow passages between buildings that Kennedy had always felt out of place, like something she might have encountered around the Mediterranean region or Mesopotamia. She'd originally suggested platting O'Hara on a grid. She'd given up on that once it had been demonstrated that the site's drainage required a more flexible plan.

The first shelters in O'Hara had been little more than rocks stacked waist-high, with stout sticks or salvaged two-by-fours supporting blue nylon and a few camouflage canvas tarps tied off around large rocks. The first winter had been terrible by Arizonan standards. Wind-blown rain and snow and frozen mornings had made things miserable for three months for the few dozen who'd lived there at the time.

After that, people built sturdy dwellings out of salvaged cinder blocks and roofed with sheet metal. Those early permanent dwellings had been educational. After that, all homes were constructed using a combination of salvaged blocks, local rock, and adobe. Anything salvaged, of course, had to be brought up from the valley by mule train at considerable time and labor.

Since then, walls, both exterior and interior, were traditionally decorated using salvaged paint from abandoned hardware stores. To the paintings had been added vertical gardening elements.

The first food had been grown in what had been mucked out of the middens where the plateau drained into the upper end of O'Hara Creek. There had been some initial concerns about health and safety, since that creek eventually drained into the Gila River. But the climate was so dry, river contamination from O'Hara was really only a problem during monsoonal rains.

Single-season crops like gourds had been the first food plants grown in the first midden gardens. Some of the first attempts had been dismal failures. Corn, for example, had been tried on the theory that it was “an Indian food.” Those sorts of inaccurate ideas had quickly been abandoned in favor of native plants and some African imports retrieved from around the ruins.

Low-water crops like yams had been added later, once O'Harans had solved the sanitation issues. Sturdy vines covered some walls, trellises supporting beans stood attached to others, and a couple of pergolas kept other sorts of vines up off the ground and cast welcome shade beneath.

Even twenty years later, the plateau could not support the town's human population, even with the additions of as many cisterns as could be crammed into the place. Shrub and tree orchards had later been planted down along the banks of the Gila River. The potato and onion crops had been moved down there, as had half the goat herds, once the town had grown enough and danger of banditry had dropped to manageable levels.

Kennedy greeted people along her way to the O'Hara's lone gate at the eastern edge, one bump over from the main drainage. The place reminded her of an ant farm. People from the small farming town below had evacuated up to O'Hara, bringing as much food and supplies as they could carry. Every free pair of hands was busy hauling rocks for the trebuchets or making arrows. She almost hoped the enemy were stupid enough to try taking O'Hara. And if they were, they were going to pay dearly for it.

Her horse, a beautiful grey-dappled Aramino mare, stood ready beside April's chestnut gelding. Both women bounded onto their mounts and rode out through the open gates. The clang of steel sounded behind them, heavy steel beams sliding into place.

The two wound their way down a series of switchbacks to the south of O'Hara Creek, turning onto Santa Cruz Rd. From there, the only sign of the invading army was the cloud of dust off to the east, the intermittent plumes of smoke from the firestorm rained down by the Remoras, and the black dots of the Remoras themselves hanging against a nearly cloudless sky.

Those fires concerned Kennedy. As summer of CY 1 had approached, many survivors had assumed the desert could not burn. They had been wrong. While a lot of bare rock rose to form the mountains, the valleys and plains of Estrella supported sagebrush, mesquite, and creosote brush, the latter of which was particularly flammable. It made for an excellent cooking fuel. But it also fed hot, fast, wildfires. The enemy might not have been shattered from the repeated fires set around them, but many of them surely suffered from smoke inhalation.

They nudged their horses onto the soft, dusty shoulder and brought them up to a sustainable trot. Kennedy took the time to gaze up at the long spine of Sierra Estrella looming on her left, and sighed contentedly. The scenery was one of only four things that could make her smile.

Five miles later, they reached the gates of Santa Cruz. Before the Change, there'd been an old Mission church and a few scattered outbuildings on the site. Since then, a small agricultural town had assembled there. Unlike O'Hara, which had been planned, Santa Cruz had begun its post-Change life as a refugee community. Like O'Hara, the first shelters in Santa Cruz had been tarps and cinder blocks. It had likewise eventually become a collection of block-and-adobe dwellings surrounded by a defensible adobe wall that reminded Kennedy of nothing other than the Alamo on steroids. Its permanent site had been chosen because of its location above the flood-plain of two branches of the Gila River which watered the fields.

On a normal day, a sentry on the ground or in one of the gate towers would have saluted her. Instead, the gates stood tightly closed. Its residents, like those of all the small settlements in the area, had been evacuated to better-fortified locations. While the Santa Cruz wall was easily proof against the usual threats, there was no way it could repel the army advancing from the south.

The pair trotted past the fortress and down the dusty road that stayed along the bench above the western side of the Gila River flood-plain. Before the Change, travelers from Santa Cruz to the northern end of Sierra Estrella had to drive north to Beltline Road, then a few more miles north, cross the Salt River, then head west a few miles to recross the Gila River west of the confluence.

After the Change, keeping to the paved roads was usually more trouble than it was worth, especially on horseback. People had therefore made their own roads as a function of the most efficient and reliable ways to ride from one village to another.

Kennedy cast an occasional eye across the valley to South Mountain. Once a regional park, it was home to the second-largest community in all of Estrella. One of the first things discovered during the First Change Year was that while the Phoenix ruins contained hundreds of thousands of pre-Change dwellings, pitifully few of them had been habitable without electric air conditioning. Most of those that might have been serviceable post-Change had either burned, or had become de facto crypts. There had really only been one choice: build entirely new homes out of rock, salvaged materials, and adobe.

So construction had begun at the center of South Mountain Park, more or less concurrently with the construction of O'Hara. The site was fairly defensible. While only two hundred feet higher than the valley surrounding the South Mountain massif, there were only a few routes into it. Those were relatively easy to wall off. High ridges rose several hundred feet: the Ma Ha Tuak Range to the north and the Gila Range to the south. Another pass to the west was also easy to wall off. Several locations, including the Dobbins Lookout, provided both advanced warning and trebuchet emplacements. Anyone trying to get in would have to labor uphill under a barrage of arrows, spears, and rocks.

Most of the salvage crews lived in South Mountain. Kennedy's team had organized them in CY 1 and put them to work mining for materials, and cleaning up identified threats to the Gila River's water. Those people still worked the ruins of Phoenix and probably would for generations to come.

Interstate-10 passed its eastern end. Which meant that road would funnel the invading army right to the South Mountain community. Assuming, of course, that the enemy intended to hit South Mountain, and not swing northwest to hit Minas Tirith first. In any event, South Mountaineers were tough folk, roughnecks and what used to be called blue collar and redneck, down to the last man, woman, and child. They'd nearly rebelled a few times in the first decade. No, anyone attacking South Mountain was going to regret it.

A few more miles brought them near the confluence of the Gila and Salt Rivers. The walls of Minas Tirith twinkled off to the left. She'd laughed the first time someone had called it that. Back in CY 1, the city had been a mere collection of buildings behind a low and growing cinder block wall built across the wash that spilled over the bench just east of the site of Phoenix International Raceway, which had been one of the very first man-made structures to be dismantled for its materials.

Her view northeastward was about the same as it had always been. No matter how much material Estrellans mined out of the city, it didn't seem to scratch the surface. Not at a distance, anyway. But she would never forget her first glimpse of Phoenix early in the First Change Year.

From a low rise at the southern end of White Tank Mountain near the junction of White Tank Gila Rd.–formerly designated Hwy. 85—and Papago Highway—formerly designated I-10—the entire metro area stretched out between there and the mountains to the east. Most of the fires that had ignited the night of the Change had burned out by then, though a few had still sent columns of black up into the clear sky.

Every road in sight had been filled with stalled vehicles and the scattered remains of human bodies. Ever-present desert scavengers, while numerous, had not yet outnumbered still-living humans. As the weeks and months had marched on, the scavengers had bred, feeding off the remains of the human dead and so had their predators. Snakes, lizards, and coyotes had been on the menu that whole first year and into the second.

Kennedy gazed up at the wall of Minas Tirith. It snaked along the ridge-line like the Great Wall of China, all cinder blocks, rock, and adobe, a minimum of twenty feet from footing to battlement. The wall was lowest where it rounded Rosenbaum Peak and highest across the mouth of the wash that drained the valley embracing the city. Contrasting with the grey-brown rock and the dull green of the sparse vegetation, the white-washed wall gleamed in the sunlight. Her lips curved upward. That was the second thing that made her smile: the fruits of her labors.

She'd laughed the first time her engineers and architects—a collection of people who'd been students and faculty at one university or other, as well as a couple of Medievalists who'd survived the aftermath of the Change—had shown her their rough plans for Minas Tirith, hastily scribbled on large drawing pads salvaged from an art supply store. She'd understood the need for protection, and they'd illustrated their point using Medieval fortifications such as Harlech Castle in Wales, so she'd basically told them to go nuts. That had been before she'd really had a solid grasp on the practicalities of managing manpower. She'd subsequently been so busy with the rest of the overall salvage, cleanup, and security operations in the nascent Estrella, that the next time she'd looked, something looking very much like the Minas Tirith from “Lord of the Rings” had practically grown up out of the rock of northern Sierra Estrella.

Its guard saluted Kennedy as she reined in before the gate. She returned it. She ignored the fleeting feeling of inadequacy that still reared its ugly head from time to time. She kept forgetting that an increasing number of Estrellans had no idea the things she'd done during the Dying Time, things that still occasionally gave her nightmares.

In the wake of the Change, even as Buffy had organized Yuma when the city's own government had fallen to pieces, refugees had streamed out of Las Vegas to the north and the Phoenix area to the east. Mercifully, three hundred miles of desert to the south of Vegas had killed most of the people who'd fled that city. Violence had finished off most of those who'd made it as far as Lake Havasu City. Which meant that the several hundreds who'd trickled in along Hwy. 95 had been relatively easy to absorb. From stranded motorists to evacuees, some of them had readily agreed to assimilate into whatever work crews had been needed. Others had been hostile. If one looked closely enough at the asphalt pavement and gravel shoulders, one could still see the iron stains from their spilled blood.

The first month after the Change had been chaotic. When faced with a lack of leadership, people generally looked to whomever looked like they had something resembling a plan. In Yuma, that person had been Buffy Summers and, by extension, the Scoobies. The reason for that had been fairly simple: the survivors of Sunnydale readily admitted the existence of things most other people couldn't explain or wouldn't recognize, that the impossible was possible.

When the first refugees from Phoenix had begun to trickle into Yuma in mid-April, they were assimilated. But with a source population in excess of four million, those numbers had climbed sharply after a couple of weeks. By the end of that month, those people had begun to be routed around Yuma and toward El Centro. A few of those people had family in Yuma and had been allowed into the city. For a short while, that had gone well enough.

But when El Centro had begun to turn people back, Buffy had ordered road blocks set up. That had not been a popular decision. But as Prime Slayer, Buffy had always been willing to do what was necessary, no matter the cost. Very few had seen or done what Buffy had and it showed in the haunted look in her eyes.

Kennedy had been leading the small force that had been assigned to the roadblock at the Interstate-8 gap through the Fortuna Hills. For days, people had backed up against the block. Many of them had tried to go around, but had been thwarted. As their numbers had swelled into the tens of thousands, the tension had mounted. Then, like an oncoming wave, it had crashed.

Kennedy only remembered shards of that day. The face of the sunburned white man who'd come at her with a machete still sometimes appeared in her vision when she closed her eyes.

The distinctive almost-grind of steel-on-meat, one that until that moment she had only known from slicing beef and chicken, had vibrated up her blade. In an instant, the man's face had turned from a grimace of rage to a mixture of surprise, terror, and agony. The next thing she'd remembered was standing among a sea of corpses, completely covered in human blood. After that, no one had dared approach Yuma from Phoenix. A piece of her soul had not lived to see the following dawn.

There had been an official inquiry, of course. Witnesses had reported that after that first kill, several refugees had tried to overpower her, but had quickly died on the edges of her blades. After that, Kennedy had simply cloven anything moving. Even her own comrades had stared dumbstruck as she had methodically and savagely mowed down anyone and anything that moved, her screams blending with those of the dying or fleeing.

Public opinion in Yuma had been split. Some people wanted her dead. Proposed methods had varied from simple and elegant to downright horrific. Others had sympathized with her. But most had agreed that she should not be allowed to remain living in Yuma.

She'd made little effort to defend herself. She'd known what she'd done. Her defense attorney had called it blood-lust, berserker rage, the fog of war. But the fact of the matter, as far as she'd been concerned, was that she'd murdered well over a thousand innocent people.

It had been Xander's proposal that had saved her life. Not that she'd thought her life worth saving at the time. The idea had been fairly straightforward: travel upriver to Phoenix, and secure the water supply. She'd accepted the proposal on the grounds that even though she couldn't undo what she'd done, then perhaps she could help avert the deaths of tens of thousands of others.

And so it had been that she and thirty others, mostly volunteers, had set off by bicycle up the Yuma River toward Phoenix. Progress had been slow. But each stalled vehicle towed away from the river, and each body dragged off to be burned, had been a minor victory. It had taken months to work their way as far as Theba and Painted Rock Reservoir, a distance of barely a hundred miles. But people had quickly discovered that distances post-Change had suddenly become much greater than they'd been before.

Relying on provisions sent up from Yuma, her crew's days had consisted of long stretches of nothing interspersed with frequent surveillance through binoculars, diversions to the riverside to take care of things, and the occasional clash with someone who had managed to survive among the ant-line of stalled vehicles. Kennedy had not wanted to know what those people had been eating, though her initial suspicions had probably been correct.

Kennedy had sent regular reports back to Yuma. Those included a running total of what and how much had been removed from drainages and arable fields, as well as a complete inventory of agricultural land, serviceable equipment, intact structures, anything salvageable, and estimates concerning wells and the integrity of sewage ponds. In return, Yuma kept Kennedy's people supplied with provisions. Which had been fortuitous. Anything and everything edible had been thoroughly stripped.

They'd found their first confirmed nest of Eaters at a truck stop by the junction of I-8 and Hwy. 85 outside of Gila Bend. That was where Kennedy had begun to suspect that there had been worse crimes than the one she'd committed. The same had occurred to her later, just before she'd personally broken into the Arizona State Prison and slaughtered most of its occupants.

Her task had grown increasingly difficult and time consuming the further upriver they'd gone. Outside of Yuma, the Gila River was a wide, dry, sandy wash much of the year, particularly prior to the Change. But upstream of the Painted Rock Reservoir, the river had an increasing amount of water in it. That water had drawn refugees, who had subsequently died of starvation, or violence.

And, of course, the numbers of bodies had dramatically increased as the distance to Phoenix had decreased. Kennedy had left a trail of smoldering mass funeral pyres from Gila Bend to Buckeye. Then the real work had begun.

The Gila River flood-plain had greened up since then. With no electric pumps sucking water from the subsurface flow or diverting so much of the water from the stream itself, a lot more flowed through the river in all seasons. Which, in turn, kept things green longer.

Kennedy and April walked their horses through the gate, then along a gravel lane packed by years of foot, hoof, and wagon traffic. They quickly turned off and into the expansive stables where they handed their mounts off to a pair of grooms.

“Make sure they're refreshed,” said Kennedy. “We're going to need them.”

“Si, Ma Donna,” the man replied. There was an edge to his voice, one of grim determination and resignation. She'd heard that tone before, many times.

The city was packed with the people and provisions that had been called in from the outlying communities. The enemy was sure to lay siege to Minas Tirith, and when it did, there would be no going in or out, except by dirigible.

Much of the lowermost plain was filled with tents and horses. People darted about, bearing arrows, carts of animal fodder, earthenware water jugs, pickle barrels filled with water or incendiary fluids, and spare rocks.

Dwellings built against the slopes and atop each other like an Anasazi village were occupied at, or in some cases beyond, capacity. Once the fighting began at the gates, anyone not directly involved with combat was to be shut up in those homes.

Kennedy made her way up to her own modest dwelling, frantically scribbling on her yellow pad the whole way. She remembered repeated offers by her architects and civil engineers to build her a villa and every time, she'd declined. Ostensibly, that had been on the grounds that she'd spent so little time at home, that it would have been a waste of resources. While that had always been true, and while everyone had seen her point, she'd privately felt unworthy.

Even after having been hailed as Contessa in CY 4, she'd declined it. The eventual need for something resembling permanent office space—she'd eventually had to admit that declaring her office to be wherever she happened to be had been impractical in the long term—and the extra space for a family had finally changed her mind in CY 6. Even so, even though she'd rolled her eyes at her architects' “Oval Office” proposal, she'd insisted on only what had been necessary. Her people had embellished a little anyway.

No sooner had she opened the front door, then cries of “Mama! Mama!” assaulted her ears. She smiled. Her children were the third thing that had that effect on her. Her two youngest—twins Jason and Jenny—hurled themselves at her legs and looked up at her with adoring eyes. She laughed, then knelt down to hug them both.

“You look worried,” said Jason. Jenny nodded in agreement. Before he'd been a year old, Jason had displayed signs of empathic ability. Jenny...it seemed she just went along with Jason.

“Well,”said Kennedy, “some very bad people are on their way here. So we have to fight them off.”

“Are they gonna try to kill us?” Jason asked.

“Again?” said Jenny.

Kennedy nodded. “Si,” she said. “Si, they are.” It didn't seem to matter how much experience she'd acquired as a mother, she still couldn't shake her first inclination at taking the direct approach.

“Oh,” said the children together.

“So,” Kennedy continued, “I want the two of you to stay here and be very good. I'm putting your brother in charge of defending you. As soon as I find him,” she added.

Kennedy heard footsteps from behind her. “Oh, good, you're back.”

She disengaged from the twins and stood up. “Hans,” she said amiably, then smiled. She stepped forward, gave him a brief peck on the lips, then hugged him firmly, their armor clacking together. Her husband was the fourth and final thing that made her smile.

She would have had mixed feelings about that. But by the time her heart had thawed out enough to have those mixed feelings, she'd grown comfortable with the arrangement. She'd married Hans Oleson, the second son of the man running things up in Flagstaff, late in CY 4 and mainly for political reasons.

By then, her relationship with Willow Rosenbaum had long fizzled. That had begun the day of the Fortuna Massacre, as it had come to be called. If her life had been a movie, she would have cried into Willow's hair. But it hadn't happened like that. Instead, she'd locked eyes with her then girlfriend, then turned her back on the witch's tear-streaked face on her way east. They never saw each other again.

Kennedy had included short personal letters to Willow along with the official reports to Buffy she'd sent back to Yuma each month. And Willow had always sent letters back, each opened with, “Dear Ken-doll.” But Kennedy had stopped feeling much of anything for, well, much of anything that first year. She'd never really been sure if her feelings for Willow had completely died. After all, she'd named a mountain adjacent to her capital city, as well as her first-born, after the woman. In any event, that had become so much water under the bridge.

The night before her wedding to Hans, she'd told him about her background, and especially about her orientation. He'd held her gaze for what had seemed like forever, then simply said, “Huh.” He'd married her anyway, and no one had given any indication that Hans had said anything about it to anyone.

From their wedding night on, she'd suspected that he'd been trying to “screw it out of her,” as he'd put it when he'd outright admitted it years later. She'd told him it didn't work that way. Still, he'd made a valiant effort at it over the years. She'd eventually grown to love him, after a fashion. She'd even come to enjoy their moments of intimacy--surprisingly more often than not--although she was pretty sure it wasn't remotely like it might have been had she been straight.

At the very least, she'd come to understand Willow's view that one could love the person, regardless of the plumbing. At least that one would have stood a chance of passing the pre-Change LGBT gauntlet, especially if the Alfred Kinsey scale were legitimate. Otherwise, Kennedy would have been denounced as a traitor to the cause for marrying a man, and burned in effigy, or worse.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“About like our aerial recon reported,” she said. “I spent the ride from O'Hara refining the plan. It'll all be in the Joint Staff meeting this evening.” She raised her voice, projecting to carry through their dwelling and outside a bit. “Everyone, front and center! Pronto! Rapido! Darse prise!”

The room's furnishings absorbed a little of her voice. Tapestries and paintings—all salvaged from the homes of people who, for one reason or another, no longer needed them--hung on the walls. A few pieces of leather furniture sat tastefully here and there. Several Persian carpets lay on the floor. A couple of olive oil lamps flickered lazily in sconces suspended from the ceiling.

One by one, everyone in the house filed into her presence. They all stood, if not at attention, then at least very seriously. It looked so much like something out of “Sound of Music,” that Kennedy had to stifle a laugh.  
She'd taken each of them under her wing and into her household, here and there and one by one, in a variety of ways. Her own five children exhibited clear family resemblance, either to herself or to Hans, and definitely to each other.

Her first-born, Willow, could almost have passed for Kennedy's sister, and already possessed Slayer attributes. Her second, Sven, was his father's spitting image. Her third, Mara, looked like them both. And, of course, the twins Jason and Jenny.

She'd found Michael as a toddler at Luke Air Force Base. His parents had died when hunger-driven people from elsewhere in Phoenix had stormed the base. Some of the intruders remained ensnared in barbed wire, their sun-bleached bones picked clean long ago.

Heather had been liberated from a den of Eaters. Kennedy had made her responsible for Michael.

Luke Cloudracer was Hans' cousin. A born troublemaker, so it had seemed, he'd been a thorn in his uncle's side. His removal to Estrella had been part of the agreement Kennedy had made with Jarl Oleson that had also included marrying Hans. She'd wasted no time whipping Luke into shape and giving him focus and purpose.

Luke's sister Leah had shown up out without warning a year after Hans and Kennedy's wedding. And she'd been pregnant. She'd been resolutely taciturn concerning her child's paternity. Her son Ben had been born the following spring.

Maria Sanchez, who'd become their part-time housekeeper, had been trapped in the Arizona State Prison the day Kennedy had stormed the compound. As with so many other things, including real estate, and surviving the Dying Time, it had all come down to location. Some of the prison's inmates had managed to escape. Others within had already died--some from violence, some from starvation, others from disease—by the time Kennedy had arrived. The day of the Change, Maria had been visiting her brother, serving time for running drugs. The power loss had locked her and everyone else inside. Neither Kennedy, nor anyone else had been able to coax further useful information out of her. But the woman had been invaluable for her mad culinary skills, which had been a god-send on many occasions. Since then, she'd taken on a small army of staff and apprentices and still oversaw bulk food preparation for the Estrellan military.

Not present were Kyla, Cecilia, Arthur, Chewie, and Wedge. Cecilia was nine months pregnant. Wedge was Captain of the Remora squadron unit and stationed over at Castle Anthrax, which had been built on the site of Kennedy's first encampment in the White Tank Mountains due west of Luke Air Base where the dirigibles were hangared. The others had already reported to their units.

Those members of Kennedy's household had arrived during spring of the second Change Year with an influx of new people, most of whom had managed to head up into the Superstition Mountains to the east and the Tonto National Forest to the north in the wake of the Change. They'd survived with basic backpacking gear and whatever food they could carry. But of the estimated twenty-three thousand who'd gone up into those mountains, most of them had possessed neither the knowledge nor the tools to live off the land long-term. Many of them hadn't survived the winter.

When they'd returned to the city in the hopes of scavenging, most of them enlisted with Kennedy's unit. Not that they'd been given much of a choice. It had been that, or extradition back to the mountains. A few had chosen the mountains and they still had occasional contact with Estrellans.

The eldest of Kennedy's adopted children had been thirteen at the time she'd first encountered them. She'd never been sure why she'd had such a soft spot for children. She'd once thought it might have been because of the ones she'd killed at Fortuna. She sure as hells had been, and still was, too busy to deal with children, or so she'd thought. Yet she'd taken in what some had considered to be more than her fair share. Those children had since grown up and most of them had spouses and children of their own.

“Right,” she said. “As you all know, we're under attack. Sven, I want you in armor before dawn. It's your responsibility to defend your siblings, nieces and nephews, and this home. Willow, you'll be with me. Be in armor and report to me with your war bow outside the Command Bunker in three hours.

“Your father and I have a Staff meeting in two hours. Do you all understand your instructions?”

“Si, Ma Donna!” they said together.

“Good. Now, I'm going to bathe while I still can. I suggest the rest of you do the same.”

“Want some help?” Hans asked.

Kennedy rolled her eyes and giggled. “Men,” she said. “If you insist.” Truth be told, she had a whole plethora of hard-to-reach places which, despite her flexibility, were still, well, hard to reach. She shed her armor, hanging it on its stand before walking to the bath room, husband in tow.

Their bath room was standard for Estrellan architecture. It was little more than a small room with what was essentially an oversized wine barrel sitting on a raised slab of thin-split quartzite salvaged from a pre-Change landscaping center. One of Maria's underlings had built a small fire beneath the slab to warm the tub. Embers glowed in the shadow.

They peeled off their sweaty clothes, tossing them to the floor, then went about sponging each other down from sun-warmed water in a much smaller metal pail that sat on a small stack of rocks. The water drained through a small grate set into the floor, and eventually out into the central channel in the middle of the city's wash.

Most everyone in the city washed once a week. In the middle of summer, which across most of Estrella was easily half the year, some people washed a couple of times a week, occasionally daily if they were doing hard labor. Most washing consisted of a sponge bath using a wet cloth and warm water. Most everyone at least wiped down face, neck, hands, and feet at the end of each day. Once every month, most had the luxury of a good soak once they'd sponged the majority of the day's dirt, sweat, and grime from their skin, which sometimes necessitated some vigorous scrubbing.

Once they'd finished with the sponging, Kennedy stepped toward the tub. She paused, noticing that peculiar smirk on her husband's face. She glanced down, then cocked an eyebrow. “Seriously?” she said.

Hans grinned at her. “Well, you know...” He let the rest dangle. She knew, alright. She was still a lithe-bodied female, Slayer healing resisting the effects of age, and he was still a hot-blooded man alone in a room with his naked wife. And they had time.

She exhaled heavily, more for effect than anything. “You man,” she teased. Truth be told, she wanted it too, orientation be damned.

When they were finished, they sponged each other off again.

“You really do have a hair trigger, you know that?” she said, tossing the sponge back into its pail.

“It's not the size of the army, it's the fury of its onslaught.” He smacked her on the buttock just before she climbed into the tub. She made an eeping sound, then returned the favor.

“Ow!” Hans yelped.

“Oh, you like it and you know it.”

“It's just...you and that Slayer strength of yours,” he said as he slipped into the tub across from her.

She shrugged. “Why do you think I like it rough?” she said with a grin.

“Because you're still self-flagellating, even after all these years.”

Her smile faded and she tipped her head back. “Not that again. That's a Catholic thing anyway.”

“A lot of people are going to die tomorrow. Maybe us. I just think it's a good idea to go with a clear conscience. I thought I might help you with that.”

She snapped her head up and glared. A hand shot out, pushing a vertical wave of water that slapped Hans in the face. “Goddess-dammit, Hans!” she spat. “You can't fix me! So stop trying.”

He sighed, then slid around the tub to sit beside her. “I'm sorry,” he said.

He sounded sincere. He probably was. After the honeymoon period had worn off late in the first year of their marriage, Hans had suggested, and on more than one occasion, that her orientation was something curable. She'd insisted that it wasn't something that needed curing and had assured him, in no uncertain terms, that if it hadn't changed in the previous two decades, it probably never would.

She'd metaphorically held him at arm's length for their whole second year. After that, he'd given up trying to fix her, except for the rare and random instance which Kennedy had eventually taken to be hope or wishful thinking on his part. Instead, he'd chosen to simply love her unconditionally. It had been his active love and respect for her, and the birth of their first child, that had begun to thaw her icy heart.

“Forgiven,” she said at length.

He draped an arm around her shoulder. “You know I love you,” he said.

“Si, I know,” she breathed. “And I love you, too. Goddess knows why.” She reflexively settled against him. “But you can be so difficult sometimes.”

“Hey, you married me.”

Kennedy snorted. “Oh, you know exactly why I married you. It's in our contract.”

“And I married you for sex and power,” he said.

She laughed. “Of course you did,” she teased. “I was a young thing and you were...what was that expression...ah, yes, interested in my ass and what I could do with it.”

“Still am.”

“I think I told you where you could stick it, too.”

He chuckled. “You also threatened to rip my lungs out through my nose with your bare hands if I ever cheated on you.”

“So I did.”

“Maybe it's fitting that we'll be fighting for our survival on our anniversary,” he said.

She laid her head on his shoulder. “You do know how to sweet-talk a girl,” she said.

They sat like that for a short while before wordlessly clambering out to stand dripping beside the floor grate. They grabbed a pair of salvaged terry towels from a wooden shelf and wrapped themselves before leaving the room. Drying off wasn't necessary in early September. The hot, dry desert air did that well enough, even in the relative coolness of their adobe dwelling.

“Next!” she said as they walked out.

Willow shot her a look, then shook her head. “Parents,” she muttered.

Kennedy just chuckled. “Don't take too long,” she said. That meeting wasn't going to run itself.


End file.
